Accent Grid

Typing in accented letters or special characters on a PC keyboard is a pain in the neck. This simple Chrome extension aims to make that task slightly easier.

The extension button displays a four-by-four grid of characters. Clicking on a character copies it to the clipboard. Pressing the shift key does what you would expect: it toggles the grid between lowercase and uppercase letters.

You can also use the keyboard to copy characters to the clipboard. The keys 1-4, Q-R, A-F and Z-V correspond to the grid characters in the obvious manner. Chrome allows you to assign a keyboard shortcut to the extension itself: just go to the bottom right hand corner of the Extensions page and follow the link.

The options page lets you customise the choice of characters in the grid. The defaults are set up for common French and German letters, plus a few extras such as smart quotes and dashes.

I haven't included acute accents in the default setup since these can be typed in directly on US and UK keyboards. For instance, Ctrl + Alt + E gives you an E with an acute accent. Macs have a rich variety of keyboard shortcuts for accents built in, rendering this extension somewhat redundant. It should still work though!

Comments, bug reports and suggestions for improvement are very welcome. You can email me on [email protected] or contact me on Twitter at @bat020.