Advice on keying in accented characters for writing Gaelic

Using MS-Windows

With a UK physical keyboard (one where the top row starts !"£$ rather than !@#$)

The secret is that you should use the control panel (Windows settings) to set up Microsoft’s United Kingdom Extended keyboard.
(Or else the wonderful Whacking Sandy keyboard if you want even more characters)

Microsoft’s Irish keyboard is also good for Scottish Gaelic, but has been superceded by United Kingdom Extended. Make sure, though, that you do not use Microsoft’s so-called “Scottish Gaelic” keyboard which is actually not nearly as good for typing Gaelic! It messes up the apostrophe key and is a total red herring. Microsoft have been planning for years to change it to make it identical to United Kingdom Extended, but this does not seem to have happened yet (2023).

Choose the following:

Start > Control Panel
Regional and Language
Keyboards and Languages
Change keyboards...

or perhaps, depending on your computer:

Start > Settings > Control Panel
Regional and Language Options
Languages
Details...

After this the fine detail gets a bit vague and depends on what you already have set up on your computer, but remember that what you are aiming for is:

...
  Keyboard
    United Kingdom Extended

and that you can safely get rid of any other keyboards unless you know for sure yourself that you need them.

You’ll probably see something like:

English (United Kingdom)
  Keyboard
    United Kingdom

Click “Add...”. Then in the dropdown menu, scroll down til you reach your your input method, probably English (United Kingdom) as shown above, then under Keyboard click “Show more” if necessary, then choose “United Kingdom Extended” and click OK. Then make United Kingdom Extended the default keyboard (That’s the box above). The best thing then is to remove any other keyboards unless you know for sure that you need them, because otherwise you can switch to them by accident (pressing Ctrl+Shift is the culprit) and be left wondering why accents have stopped working.

Old instructions, just in case they are still relevant for older computers: Click on the word “Keyboard” to select it, and then click “Add...”. Then from the dropdown menu under “Keyboard layout/IME” choose “United Kingdom Extended” and click OK. Then the simplest thing to do is to remove the “United Kindom” keyboard altogether because you don’t need it.

After that you should be able to get accents all the vowels, both upper and lower case, by pressing and releasing the grave-accent key on the keyboard (just left of the ‘1’ key) and then typing the vowel. This will work in any program whatsoever - Word, Excel, Notepad, Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc - and is very quick and easy.

As a bonus, the United Kingdom Extended keyboard also gives you the accents required for typing many other European languages.

If you have problems, send me an email (sm00cpd@uhi.ac.uk) or contact me via Facebook and I’ll try to guide you through it via chat or videochat.

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With a US physical keyboard (one where the top row starts !@#$ rather than !"£$)

If you go for Microsoft’s best offering you should proceed as above, but install the United States-International keyboard rather than Microsoft’s United Kingdom Extended keyboard. You should also retain the US keyboard rather than deleting it, because, while the United States-International keyboard is very useful for typing all sorts of accented characters, it makes it more awkward to type ordinary apostrophes and various other characters so you probably won’t want to use it all the time.

Instead of United States-International, though, you are probably better going for John Cowan’s excellent Moby keyboard.

Macintosh

• Keying accented characters on the Macintosh

iPad/Android touchscreens

Hold your finger on the vowel key for a moment, a small window pops up containing a choice of the vowel with different diacritics . You then just slide you finger over onto the one you want and release.

Chromebook

With a US physical keyboard (one where the top row starts !@#$), set up the “US Extended” (US EXTD) keyboard driver.

With a UK physical keyboard (one where the top row starts !"£$), download the “UK Extended Keyboard Extension”.

• Advice at iGaidhlig
• How To Write Foreign Character Accents Using Your Chromebook