How do I turn off accent combining in Windows 7?
I have English Windows 7 Professional with Hungarian keyboard language installed. The English keyboard layout works as expected, but for the Hungarian layout some kind of "accent combining" is activated.
The effect of this ^+o becomes ô, ^+a becomes â, etc.
This is not helpful at all, since the accented characters of Hungarian are already mapped to keys, but it's really annoying because I have to type a non-combining character to actually get ^.
Is there any way to turn this "feature" off?
Solution 1:
How to create a custom keyboard layout on Windows 7
Get Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator as noted by @bubu.
Start Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator
We're going to load an existing keyboard
And Hungarian it is!
The accent characters seem to only be available on the Hungarian layout when AltGr is pressed. So let's view that layout.
Right-click one of the accent keys you want to change. And uncheck the option Set as dead key.
Confirm your choice by clicking OK.
The key has now become a regular key and will behave like any of the normal letters. Repeat this process for all other keys you want to change.
Export your new keyboard layout.
When asked to review your layout properties, confirm and adjust them to your liking. When you're done, press OK.
You will now get a folder with an installer package for your keyboard layout.
Install it and you will be able to select your new keyboard layout from the system dialog.
This is the dialog where you would usually select your keyboard layout. You can even see my customized layout German - Programmer which is a customized German layout without dead keys (the same thing you want to achieve).
A word of advice though! Using custom keyboard layout can have some undesirable effects.
For example, when using RDP to connect to another Windows machine, that machine will not know your keyboard layout and switch to English.
Before I used my custom layout, the other machines would happily adapt to German layout.
If you have issues with your keyboard layout being switched around during RDP sessions after using this procedure, please see: How can I stop the remote computer from changing my keyboard layout?
It's still worth it.