Typing umlauts and accents on a US keyboard in Windows 11

Photo of a keyboard
Photo by Sergi Kabrera on Unsplash

If you need to type a language with umlauts, accents, or other special characters on Windows, the usual workarounds are:

  • Copy & paste the characters from somewhere
  • Temporarily switch to a different keyboard layout and guess which key does what
  • Memorise Alt + Number codes, e.g. Alt + 148 to get ö.
  • Switch to the "US International" keyboard layout, which allows you to type e.g. " + o for ö at the expense of turning ", ', ~ etc into dead keys, i.e. you'll have to type " + <space> to get the ". Some combinations are also a bit unintuitive, e.g. pressing Right-Alt + L to get ø...

Or you could try the "US Extended" keyboard, which is originally from MacOS and also available for Linux as "English (Macintosh)", but unfortunately not built into Windows. Andrew Dunning thankfully recreated it using Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), but the installers were created in 2016 and were giving me errors on Windows 11. You can still open his United States-Extended.klc file in MSKLC though, and I've used it to recreate the installer on Windows 11: Download it here

The advantage over the "US International" layout is that it leaves your commonly used  quotation marks etc alone. This is how it works: Many common combinations are fairly intuitive, e.g.

  • Right-Alt + u, then a/e/i/o/u/y/w/t/h/x for umlauts or diaresis on the letters, e.g. Right-Alt + u, then a gives you ä
  • Right-Alt + e, then a/e/i/o/u/y/w/r/p/s/g/k/l/z/c/n/m for acute accents on the respective letters, e.g. é
  • Right-Alt + `, then a/e/i/o/u/y/w/n for grave accents on the respective letters, e.g. è
  • Right-Alt + n, then a/e/i/o/u/y/n/v for a tilde on top of the character, e.g. ñ
  • Right-Alt + s for ß
  • Right-Alt + c for ç
  • Right-Alt + o for ø
  • Right-Alt + 0 for the degree sign º

And then there are less intuitive ones, but at least pretty much every latin-derived character seems possible:

  • Right-Alt + A, then a/e/i/u/o/y/r/g/l for macrons, e.g. ā
  • Right-Alt + k, then a/u/y/w for a circle on top, e.g. å
  • Right-Alt + Shift + 2 for the Euro sign €
  • Right-Alt + ' for æ
  • Right-Alt + q for œ
  • And many, many more...