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A Better Greek Keyboard Layout

By Ben ⋅ 9th Mar 2009 ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

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I love the way you can seamlessly switch between Latin, Greek and Hebrew on the mac, but it wasn’t perfect until I made this custom unicode keyboard layout.

greek-keyboard.zip (36kb)

1. Unzip this file and put the contents in /Library/Keyboard Layouts

2. Then go to the International system preferences, to the Input Menu tab and turn on Greek Polytonic BH.

3. (optional) Click on ‘Keyboard Shortcuts to assign some shortcuts to switch languages. (I use COMMAND-L and COMMAND-OPTION-L)

Here are the main differences between the standard Greek Polytonic keyboard and my one:

Greek Char My Keyboard Apple’s Keyboard
θ q u
ω w v
ψ y c
ς (final sigma) option-s w
ξ x j
χ c x
; (question mark) ? or ; q
´ (acute accent) / ;
` (grave accent) \ ]
῀ (circumflex) = [
῾ (rough breathing) [ "
᾿ (smooth breathing) ] ‘

I find these keys more intuitive and when I get going I can type Greek pretty fast… anyway, let me know what you think.

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Discussion

2 comments for “A Better Greek Keyboard Layout”

  1. Posted by Tim Pinnock | 15th Mar 2009, 2:22 pm

    Thanks for this Ben. I haven’t yet had the need to type Greek yet, but I’ve installed your layout and I’m sure it will be useful when I do!

  2. Posted by Tim Pinnock | 12th May 2009, 2:46 pm

    Hi Ben, just trying out your keyboard layout. How do I type an iota subscript (e.g. ῳ) with it? I found that with Apple’s keyboard it’s option-i and then v, but with yours I get the iota subscript as a separate character (e.g. ͺω).

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