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Jonas Grønbek
Asked: 2020-10-22 23:38:04 +0800 CST

Danish key mappings on english keyboard

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Most nice keyboards don't include æ, ø and å keys, so I was wondering if it would be possible to bind something like caps lock to some of the keys {capsl + ' = æ}, {capsl + " = 'ø'} and, {capsl + " = å} or something similar?

keyboard keyboard-layout shortcut-keys

2 Answers

  1. See 'update', below.

    Thanks for asking this question! You may have seen the altgr-intl layout, which enables you to access accented characters on a US qwerty keyboard. This was based on the Microsoft International Keyboard and that wasn't my smartest choice (as Microsoft included some exotic letters like ð (eth) that nobody uses).

    So, we tried to make a (new) US layout, that supports all Western European languages (in the sense that all accented characters in those languages are available through one AltGr keystroke). We called it altgr-weur.

    Right now, the project is ready but before I offer this to be included in the already numerous layouts, I'd like people to test it. A few are working on it, but no Danes yet.

    So, please install the layout and let me know if it suits your needs. I'm pretty confident, after all the letter frequency analysis we went through.

    The special characters in Danish are Å (a-overring) on AltGr-z q, Ø (o-slash) on AltGr-t and Æ (...) on AltGr-x w.

    Update: after some discussion, we decided to re-think our layout and changed quite a bit (early 2021). The link to the (updated) website still works.

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  2. Best Answer

    If you map CapsLock to the Compose key (you can do it through Settings → Keyboard → Layouts → Options, look for "Position of Compose key"), they will be accessible through Composeaa (å), Composeae (æ), and Composeo/ (ø). Note those are three keypresses in a sequence, not a combination to press at once. Use uppercase letters to get the uppercase variant.

    This is the method I personally use to type Danish, since I grew up with the Polish layout, which is based on standard US QWERTY with AltGr, and hate the Danish layout (as well as any other "national" layout not based on standard QWERTY) with a passion, for the simple reason that it makes it impossible to switch between languages easily because they all move things around in incompatible ways.

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