Friday 19 March 2010

Switching between cyrillic and latin keyboard layouts

Most of the time, I'm writing in German on my N900; but from time to time, I write English — e.g., right now — and Bulgarian, which is written in cyrillic letters. While it's not a big deal writing in English on a German QWERTZ keyboard, I needed some possibility to quickly switch between QWERTZ and ЙЦУКЕ (for some funny reason, I've always written Bulgarian texts with a Russian key layout — which comes in handy now that the N900 doesn't offer Bulgarian; although I'm sure it can't be a big deal to install the Bulgarian layout, I saw software packages for that). At the same time, I want the automatic word completion to work for German and English, but not Russian, since I never type anything Russian.

And here's how I do that:

  • Open the settings, tap on the Keyboard settings (Texteingabe).
  • Hardware layout: German
  • Use virtual keyboard: yes
  • 1st language: German, dictionary: German
  • 2nd language: Russian, dictionary English (!)
  • Use dictionaries in parallel: yes

I normally use the hardware keyboard. When I need to type something in Bulgarian, I simply close the lid, tap into the text area on screen so that the virtual keyboard pops up, and then have a Russian virtual keyboard. If not, I have to change it by tapping on the “” button that is located left to the Return button on the virtual keyboard (3rd from right in the button row right underneath the text display). Admittedly, this way I only get the cyrillic characters via the software keyboard, but then, I still do a lot of mistakes when typing on the Russian keyboard without seeing the layout.

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