Google has released an official extension that enables ‘UK extended keyboard’ layout on Chromebooks.
Yeah, I know: hardly ‘hold the front page’ news.
But for multilingual British Chromebook users it is currently a bit of a faff to type anything other than acute accent characters, currently requiring the entire keyboard layout to be switched first.
And that gets real old, real fast.
New Extension
To help, Google has released a new extension for Chrome OS that rectifies this oversight. When installed, UK users can use the backquote key (`) on a Chromebook keyboard as a dead key — a modifier key — to type grave accents in the same way they would on Linux, Mac OS or Windows.
After installing the free add-on, it can be configured like so:
- Visit chrome://settings/languages
- Add ‘English (UK)’
- Check the “UK Extended” option
Then, switching to the UK Extended layout can be achieved by pressing the Alt + Shift shortcut.