Latin ISO Keyboard

In this prior post I discussed my recent transition from Mac back to Windows and the adventures to have a workable Russian phonetic keyboard to type on my default EN-US physical keyboard.

For speakers of latin languages, Mac’s Spanish ISO keyboard layout is also fantastic because allows to write in Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian (and for sure many others that scape my limited knowledge) without the need to ever switch layouts.

Windows’ built in Spanish keyboard layout is almost as good:

… the ALTGR+; override that exists in Mac isn’t there! What is going on?

That seems quite absurd to me. It is not only that “I am used to Mac’s way”, it is the fact that “4” is a relatively hard to access key in the periphery, while “;” is more accessible and, additionally, is the default position for the Spanish letter ñ that share the familiar tilde with ã and õ.

The Keyboard Layout Creator allows us to fix this issue, and in this case it is much easier than with the Russian layout since we just need to copy the so-called Dead Key assignments present in letter 4 (a Dead Key is essentially a modifier, a key that doesn’t produce a symbol by itself but modifies the following keypress).

The mappings for the tilde dead key, in text, are as follows:

U+006e | U+00f1 | n |ñ
U+0061 | U+00e3 | a |ã
U+006f | U+00f5 | o | õ
U+004e | U+00d1 | N | Ñ
U+0041 | U+00c3 | A | Ã
U+004f | U+00d5 | O | Õ
U+0020 | U+007e | | ~

In any case, here is the end result. It does the job extremely well. I called it the “SpISO” keyboard. You can download it from the following link:

The layout of the keys is exactly as you would expect in Mac:

Last but not least a piece of advice. Windows is far from perfect and sometimes a language will seem impossible to remove from the Keyboard Layout Bar, stuck at the end of it.

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