Google blocks me from typing Swedish
This started happening to me today. But with the way features roll out these days, who know how many people have already had this problem.
TL;DR: option ⌥ + W starts Google’s “Help me write” AI in Google Docs, blocking the letter å that has been there on international keyboards my entire life.
I grew up in the Netherlands using the (tweaked) US-International keyboard layout (technical info) on a Microsoft MultiMedia Keyboard 1.0A. I was still using this keyboard when we moved to Sweden in 2007 and transitioned to having to sometimes type in Swedish.
This was not a problem. The two dots (◌̈) were available as a dead key for easy typing of ä and ö, and the å was right there on AltGr + W.
At some point I switched to a Swedish keyboard when I got my very first laptop, a white plastic MacBook. I do not remember when that happened. But my old photos on Facebook tell me I upgraded to a MacBook Pro in August 2012. And with that upgrade I also switched back to a non-Swedish keyboard, with the ANSI layout.
From that point onward I have only used non-Swedish keyboards.
For the longest time I was using “U.S. International-PC” on macOS (not to be confused with “U.S. Extended”). Which as of 10.11 is known as “ABC - Extended”. (2015 StackExchange answer edit I did about this renaming.)
This worked quiet well. I was never writing a whole lot of Swedish anymore after high school, and I liked having access to many different diacritics and nice typographic symbols. Even if the å got split into ◌̊ and a, ⌥+K; A.
At some point during the last few years I started experimenting with EurKEY. A layout that still was easy to code on, based on the US layout, but with a bunch of easily accessible letters for Swedish. It also helped that I could get this layout for both my Linux setup at home and my Apple at work, not needing to mentally switch between formats.
Oh, and the å was back!
This is great, because the last 4 years I have been writing a lot more Swedish at work then ever before.
Until today. With one fell swoop, Google took it all away from me on my work laptop. Now whenever my muscle memory types an å:
Going back to ABC works, because option-K for the overring is not hijacked. But of course people who might need the singular overdot (◌̇) that layout blocks them.
I am not really sure what I am going to do. But at least I have now ranted. And I got to have a walk down memory lane.