How do I disable automatic diacritics?

Question

I have been given a new work computer, and it exhibits some additional functionality that is slowly becoming a nuisance.

The computer supports automatic diacritics; for example, if I type an apostrophe, nothing will display on the screen. Instead, the computer waits for my next input. If the next letter supports the ring diacritic, the ring diacritic version of said letter appears. If it does not, both the apostrophe and the letter appear.

For example, if I type 'a, it prints á.

I am using a HP machine running Windows 10 Professional version 10.0.15063. A colleague has an identical machine, and we have confirmed the same behaviour on his. I can not seem to find anything to do with diacritics in Control Panel, and research has only turned up plug-ins to provide this functionality. How do I disable automatic diacritics?

Answer 1

It turns out my problem was in trying to change my keyboard layout. As it turns out, Windows 10 does not give you the option to change layouts; rather, you have a series of layouts to add and remove from.

After going to Settings > Time & Language, you are shown your current languages. For me, this only shows "English(Australia)". Click on this option, and select "Options".

From the window that pops up, you are shown a series of keyboards. I found I was using both "US" and "US International". Clicking on "US International", and selecting "Remove" disabled the automatic diacritics.

Answer 2

You probably have your keyboard layout set to 'US International'. Changing it to 'US' should fix this.

Answer 3

There's another way to solve this:

• Go to Settings > Devices > Typing Typing Settings

• Scroll down to "More keyboard settings" and select

• Click on Advanced Keyboard Settings then click on 'Input language hotkeys' which should open the Text Services and Input Languages settings window

Here you'll see a few key sequences registered to specific input languages and one of the defaults is "Between input languages" set to "LEFT ALT + Shift".

Now... if, like me, your anarchy knows no bounds and you chaotically switch between MacOS and Windows 10 you might find yourself accidentally hitting ALT+Shift when you intended Windows+Shift because your brain is still thinking Command+Shift (yeah... it happens).

So every time I hit ALT+Shift it toggled diacritics. So sometimes when I thought I'd solved my problem by removing the International keyboard thanks to the suggestion above https://superuser.com/a/1236782/1727163 it would suddenly switch to this behaviour.

My simple solution (as someone who very rarely uses accents) was to de-register that key sequence entirely.

Hope that helps someone else (or me from the future hahaha).