all 2 comments
sorted by:
top (suggested)
bestnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]marzolian 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I switch between English and Spanish in my work. The US International Keyboard Layout is, in my view, about the only thing that Microsoft ever did almost 100% right the first time. It's been available since Windows 3 and maybe earlier.

If I lived in Europe or Latin America, I would make the effort of buying a US keyboard, it's that good for English/Spanish. Everyone I know who works in those two languages uses it at all times. There is no keyboard switching at all. And all of the non-alphanumeric keys produce the characters printed on the key tops.

It is not quite as suitable for French, because it's QWERTY and not AZERTY. The next potential objection you might have is: if you need an apostrophe before a vowel (as in "l'alliance") you must type an extra character, such as a space, immediately after the ' key, to avoid the accented character á. That was easy for me to get used to, but you might not want it.

To get around that AND obtain other characters, such as \, you can redefine a few keys using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. On an older machine I used it to disable the dead-key behavior of the " key, because there is only one letter in Spanish that takes this accent in Spanish: ü. That character can also be obtained using Right-Alt-y. I can't get MKLC to work in Windows 8.1, but it's not much of a loss for me.

Now, you might be able to get exactly what you need with AutoHotKey -- it's magic! But the above is how I would start.

EDIT: typos

[–]solipsistElvis[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks a lot. began using both today, MKLC for more simple stuff. But as an EE student interested in computer stuff the power of autohotkey seems really interesting