QWERTY for Western European languages

Picture of Western European with altgr dead keys layout (screenshot of 'gkbd-keyboard-display -l us?altgr-weur')

A standard United States QWERTY keyboard is practical, even in Europe. It suits coders (programmers), expatriates and people who prefer specific (non-localized) hardware. Accented characters (which are not on the QWERTY key caps) can be typed using (AltGr-) deadkeys, but that may require 4 keys (for ö: Shift-AltGr-", followed by the letter o). AltGr-o is faster.

This layout makes all accented characters used in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish available through one AltGr keystroke. (Letters from neighboring languages remain available through additional AltGr deadkeys.)


These are the 'ground rules' for fast access to accented letters using AltGr:

Download (and print?) a cheat sheet, and read about how we made this up in the history of the layout.