To download the latest version of Spanish Accents CapsLock, please click here.
After copy-and-pasting special characters like á, é, í, and ó for my Spanish essays the last three years (and lamenting that I chose “Andrés” as my Spanish name), I finally decided to figure out a better way, and hence, my first two programs were born.
Using AutoHotKey, which I’d previously read about on Lifehacker, I wrote two quick programs: one to quickly and easily type accents for Spanish and another to type em-dashes.
Spanish_Accents_CapsLock
A simple hotkey program that provides a quick and intuitive way to type accented characters used in Spanish. Simply hold down your Caps Lock key and press “a” to type “á”. This works with all the special characters used when typing in Spanish. Note that this program disables the tilde/grave accent key (the one above “tab” and to the left of “1”). The latter is used instead of the Caps Lock key to indicate upper-case accented characters like Á. The Caps Lock still works (unfortunately). Should be compatible with all Windows systems.
Quick Reference Guide
|
You type… |
Out comes… |
|
CapsLock + a |
á |
|
CapsLock + e |
é |
|
CapsLock + i |
í |
|
CapsLock + o |
ó |
|
CapsLock + u |
ú |
|
CapsLock + n |
ñ |
|
CapsLock + w |
ü |
|
CapsLock + ? OR CapsLock + / |
¿ |
|
CapsLock + ! OR CapsLock+1 |
¡ |
|
CapsLock + < OR CapsLock + , |
« |
|
CapsLock + > OR CapsLock +. |
» |
|
` + a |
Á |
|
` + e |
É |
|
` + i |
Í |
|
` + o |
Ó |
|
` + u |
Ú |
|
` + n |
Ñ |
|
` + w |
Ü |
A note on intuitiveness
I tried to make the hotkeys easy to remember, with “á” being Cap Lock + a, “é” being CapsLock + e, and so on and so forth. However, I did choose to use CapsLock for the lowercase characters, and the tilde key for the uppercase characters, which seems a bit counterintuitive. The way I see it though, is that the lowercase characters are used much more frequently than their uppercase counterparts, and the CapsLock key is easier to hit while typing. If you disagree, let me know, and if I hear from enough people, I will reverse my decision.
Em_Dasher
A very simple program that makes it easy to type em-dashes (what are they used for?). Simply hold down the Caps Lock and press the “-” key (it’s near P and +). Should be compatible with all Windows systems.
Download
Em_Dash_Caps_Lock.exe (program)
Em_Dash_Caps_Lock.ahk (source code)