Easy diacritic insertion can now be enabled with a flag in the Canary channel
There’s a lot to celebrate with the release of ChromeOS 103, including support for features like Nearby Share and an updated Phone Hub with the ability to view recent pictures from your collection. But there’s always something to look forward to down the road and we’re taking a look at one such attraction which will allow users to type out diacritics straight from their default keyboard rather than relying on ALT codes, character maps, or other sources to input these special characters. In fact, Canary channel users are able to try this shortcut out right now.
This tip was first shared by an account named C2 Productions on Twitter and subsequently reported by Chrome Unboxed. Based on the screenshot shared by the Twitter user, diacritic suggestions will pop up when you long-press a key, illustrated below with the letter ‘c’ — in this case, a cedilla (ç). Users can click on or otherwise somehow select these recommendations to use them in their words or sentence.
Diacritics, often informally referred to as accents, are used in most languages using the Latin alphabet besides English.
Canary channel users can head to chrome://flags and toggle on the #enable-cros-diacritics-on-physical-keyboard-long-press flag. A lot of these nice-to-have features usually end up spending a long time hanging out in the pre-release stages, but considering that many Chromebooks don’t come with full number pads that will let you punch in ALT codes, we’re pretty sure this feature can’t come soon enough for multilingualists who would rather not switch keyboard languages too often. Some keyboard shortcuts are more preferable to others. And while it’s not a groundbreaking ChromeOS feature like a few we’ve seen over the years or even the ones that are also expected to be on the way, we’re also willing to bet that this keyboard shortcut will certainly make typing easier for millions of users.
