The German Extended E1 keyboard layout

[schnee]

Windows 11 recently gained two German extended keyboard layouts: German extended E1, and German extended E2. The difference to the regular German keyboard layout is that in the AltGr plane, they add a few characters and a whole bunch of new dead keys,[1] which should be quite useful. Here's a comparison, using the layouts given on the Microsoft website:


 

Keys marked in yellow are dead keys. Of these there's a lot, so you can now type å and ő (the latter is used in Hungarian) and so on without too much trouble.[2]

Undead (heh) keys there's a few new ones of, too. I'm particularly happy that you can now type a capital ẞ with just one modifier key, and the keyboard now also contains em and en dashes and a minus sign, all of which are typographically distinct from the hyphen (--−-). Soft hyphens are also there, as well as French double and single quotation marks, »« and ›‹, double and single primes ″′, upside down question and exclamation marks ¿¡, a narrow non-breaking space ( ) useful for abbreviations such as e. g.,[3] and a few mathematical multiplication symbols: the times symbol and the center dot ×·.

Of course, there's also omissions. The biggest one, IMO, is that the quotation marks used in German aren't there, which is made stranger by the fact that the French ones are there. Also, ’ (which is not used in German) is there, but the corresponding left mark ‘ isn't. I also would've liked to see an ellipsis …, and honestly could've done with the (single) emoji ☺ for the addition of which I can see no sensible reason. Well, there's still the AltGr-Shift-plane, which is still empty save for a duplicate

But anyhow! I also like the fact that the ^ dead key now works with more letters, so if you write in Esperanto you can finally type ŝ, ĉ, ĥ and ĝ directly (ŭ is also available now).

And of course, PowerToys still offers the Quick Accent toy, which I continue to highly recommend. There's also the Neo layout, which is not built into Windows but available (I think) as a separate download. I tried learning this once, but ultimately decided it was probably not worth the effort. (I'm delighted to see that there used to be a commercially-available Neo keyboard, however.)

1. A dead key is a key that you hit but that doesn't have an immediate effect, instead modifying a subsequent key press. For instance, hitting ^ and A in succession will generate  rather than ^A if ^ is a dead key.
2. The remaining trouble is that you'll have to remember where exactly the relevant dead key is located on the keyboard.
3. Useful if it is actually rendered as a narrow space, that is.

EDIT, 2024-12-25: another glaring omission: you can't type an ø on this, though å is possible thanks to the ˚ dead key.