Add öäü to the left keyboard edge

31 votes

Squeeze the keyboard just a little bit to the right and add the Umlaute. Umlaut keys don't have to be full size.

Under consideration Suggested by: Erhard (10 Apr, '20) • Upvoted: 21 Feb • Comments: 7

Comments: 7

11 Apr, '20
Janis Berneker Admin
Thank you for the input!
The idea of Typewise is that you get access to umlauts very fast. That's why you only have to press the button a tiny little bit longer (only 0.2 seconds). You don't have to press it for 1 second. That way you can already type them very fast. Probably even faster than tiny buttons on the edge.
1
20 Jul, '20
tolvanea Merged
Agree, though I would prefer them in portrait also. Extra space and special buttons are worth a sacrifice. If nothing else, extra row of buttons would make the room for them.
04 Aug, '20
Bo Sørensen
Same suggestion here, waiting even 0.2 seconds is not acceptable. This is with Danish where the æøå characters are used all the time.

Having to spend 0.2 seconds to get them means I will sadly not be using Typewise.
1
09 Jan, '21
Vakke
i started the post with same idea, just to give umlauts their own places. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the Nordic countries would find it acceptable to use a keyboard layout which doesn't have the umlauts we use all the time in our normal writing. For example ä in Finnish has the same frequency of usage like the letter d in English. It would be the 12 most used letter in the alphabet and I think a person who primarily writes in his native language wouldn't accept the compromise to hide a letter d or c under holding a button for longer.

I also understand that people who make layouts might not understand this importance in other languages and perhaps they do not even intend to make it usable for them. But if you are interested there are quite a few sites which offer letter usage frequency data in different languages which might sell you this idea. Nordic counries are small but when we are combined we still have population of almost 30 million people who need their umlauts every day.
1
06 Feb, '21
Simon
As a fellow Dane I gotta agree. Xzqw as an example are almost never used in Danish but æ, ø, and å are commonplace and very rarely not in a sentence. It seems weird to have easy access to those characters but not the others. Might I suggest looking more closely at the different keyboard layouts that are used in different languages and see if some of it can be mimiced?
07 Apr, '21
Janis Berneker Admin
"Add äöü as separate buttons in the landscape layout" (suggested by Dani on 2019-12-16), including upvotes (6) and comments (1), was merged into this suggestion.
27 Apr, '21
Frans Vincent
As a swede I use åäö all the time. Even the short hold of 0.2 seconds put me out of my flow when writing and considerably decreases the speed. It is simply unusable with them not in dedicated spaces. I would rather sacrifize the enter key behind the ö, emojis behind the å and z behind the ä for example. Best would be if I could change the layout freely and choose which buttons hold what functions and letters. It would be awesome.