ChromeOS has created a way to let you insert diacritics without a character map or ALT codes

Diacritics are glyphs added to a letter, such as accent marks or cedillas (a hook or tail added under letters, especially in French, Catalan, and Portuguese among others) to modify their pronunciation. Until now, Google has relied on ChromeOS users swapping their system keyboard or using a character map in order to input these into text boxes.

However, as spotted by C2 Productions on Twitter, the company seems to be preparing a way to suggest diacritics to you as you type. Check this out – below, the image shows a cedilla under the user’s typed-out standard English letter ‘c’. This may be able to be clicked to inject it in place of the regular C and is pronounced ‘sss’.

#enable-cros-diacritics-on-physical-keyboard-long-press.

However, this new feature is actually implemented by long-pressing a key on your keyboard with the Diacritics developer flag enabled. At this time, this can only be achieved on ChromeOS Canary, though I’m certain this will come quickly to the Stable version of the operating system, it’s just a matter of when.

The only conflict I can see occurring with this long-press method for calling up glyphs would be for anyone who prefers to press and hold any key on their keyboard to repeat a symbol, like exclamation points. In those instances, I would recommend being okay with not spamming your friends with excitement and using it the way it was intended, as one mark conveys the point, but then again, what fun is that, right?