microsoft / PowerToys

Windows system utilities to maximize productivity
MIT License
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Quick Accent - deterministic and custom character ordering would allow faster typing #33556

Open rnikander opened 1 week ago

rnikander commented 1 week ago

Description of the new feature / enhancement

One of the problems with "quick accent" is that it thwarts the kind of fast typing that you can do when you develop touch typing skills and muscle memory. It does this because you can't get 100% reliably consistent, and short, key combos for your most common characters.

For example, say I'm writing in Spanish. I need to type chars not available on normal English keyboards, like: ¿, ¡, ñ, á, é, etc. Because I'm using those a lot, I want them to be the first in the popup list that displays with the activation key (usually "space" for me). But if I enable "Sort chars by usage frequency", they take a while to move around, and are not always reliably in the expected position. Because of this, I can mistype, or I need to look at where the desired character is in the Quick Accent popup. These leads to delays in typing. If you were to watch me type, you'd see fast sequences of characters, punctuated by pauses when I need to type an alternative character. In other operating systems that shall remain nameless, I'm able to type faster, in part because of I don't need to read and double check any popup. The key combos are short, and always the same.

Scenario when this would be used?

Fast touch typing of foreign languages with alternate characters.

Supporting information

No response

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