10.6: Type accented characters without the Option key

Mar 05, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: pietervw

Snow Leopard only hintIf you regularly use a language that requires letters with diacritics -- such as á, ä, é, ë, í, ã, ñ, õ, etc. as they are used in Spanish, French or Portuguese -- and you recently switched from Windows to Mac OS X as I have, you might find this hint useful.

In Windows, while there were various ways to enter these characters, the best one of them was just to enter a ' and then the vowel, and you would get the accented version of that letter (in this example, the letter with the acute diacritic).

In Mac OS X however, if you set the keyboard layout to a language that has these letters (such as Spanish), you cannot use this trick; the only way of inputting these letters is the standard way supplied in Mac OS X (Option-e then e for é; Option-e, then i for í; etc.). I personally found this very annoying, and searched for quite a while on how to change this.

The answer is a lot simpler than I expected. If you use the US International - PC keyboard layout, you instantly get the fast way of entering the letters with diacritics back!

Go to System Preferences » Language & Text » Input Sources. Check the US International - PC input method in the list of Input Methods. (If you also use other Input Methods, uncheck the others or select the US International - PC method as the current Input Method.)

Now you can use the fastest way of entering these characters.

NOTE: Setting your keyboard layout to US International - PC could change the location of some other symbols if you ordered your Mac with an other-than-International keyboard. In my case, everything was still where it should be, but check this and experiment a little with it and find out what best suits your needs.

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