Keyboard Shortcuts for Accent Letters in Mac

In our earlier article, we have explained the alt or option code shortcuts for Mac to insert various symbols. Sometimes, you will have trouble in typing accented letters using the default English keyboard. In most of the companies, you need to use the standard MacBook with English based keyboard. In such scenario, you can still survive with different shortcuts. Let us discuss various ways to type accented letters in Mac.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Accent Letters in Mac

Here is a list of 500+ alt code shortcuts for Mac to insert accent letters. Use one of the option keys on your Mac keyboard and follow the below table to type accented letters. You need to switch the input method to Unicode Hex Input for using these shortcuts.

• Small letter example – press option or alt and e keys to make acute ´and then press a to produce small letter acute á.
• Capital letter example – press option or alt key and i keys to produce circumflex ˆ and then press shift + i to produce capital letter circumflex Î.

Using Unicode Keyboard Layout

The above table is nothing but a list of Unicode hexadecimal values on your Mac to type accented letters. On Windows based computers, you can easily use decimal value of the Unicode symbol along with alt key. However, you can’t use the alt code decimal values in Mac with the default keyboard input method. The solution is to add Unicode compatible keyboard input to type accented letters.

• Learn more on how to add Unicode Hex Input method in Mac. After setup, you can toggle the input method from the top menu bar icon.

• Now you can directly type the accented letters with Unicode values. For example, alt or option + 0102 will produce the breve capital letter A like Ă. And option + 0103 will produce the small breve a letter like ă.
• Anytime, you can switch the keyboard input to ABC to type normal characters.

Other Options

You have also few other options on Mac to insert letters with accent:

Press and Hold Special Letter Key

Apple has simplified way of entering the special letters both on Mac similar to iOS devices.

• Simply press and hold the vowels or any letter that has special or accented characters.
• Now you will see the popup showing all possible accented letters with numbers.
• Press the number to choose the letter or select the letter using trackpad gesture or mouse.
• For example, if you want to type accented a with macron like ā, press and hold a key and then press 8 to select ā.

• If you want capital letters, use shift key when pressing and holding the letter key.
• For example, press and hold shift and a keys and type 2 to make acute capital A like Á.

Using Character Viewer

Some of the option or alt code shortcuts like “Option + Shift + .” for breve and “Option + shift + ,” for macron will not work in most situations. Long pressing the letter will show the 8th option to type macron, however there are no ways to type breve. You can use Character Viewer tool to type all special characters including breve letters.

Press “Control + Command + Spacebar” keyboard shortcut keys to open Character Viewer tool which will look like below.

You can enter almost any special character using this tool. For accented letters, search under “Latin” categories or type “breve” in the search box to filter the relevant results. Simply click on the letter to insert in documents like Pages or Keynote.

Wrap Up

We hope now you have different ways to type accented letters on your Mac. Try the method which you like and practice more get familiar with that. After certain time, it will become easier for you to use the shortcuts for typing.