Couple of questions about keyboard layouts

[Blackened Apple]

Hey everyone.
I'll be getting a Macbook Air sometime next month, with the US keyboard layout, mainly for programming and because I type in English most of the time, but I still need to type in Portuguese. I want to know what options are available to me in terms of switching keyboard layouts or other solutions.

All I need in terms of special characters are ~, ´ and ` as accents (like ã, é, à, etc.) and ç. Is there any way to use the existing ~, ´ and ` characters on the keyboard to produce those accented letters? And maybe use some modifier along with c to produce ç?

Otherwise, is it possible to quickly switch between layouts (maybe with a keyboard shortcut)?

Cheers

 

[Mal]

You can set it up to switch keyboard layouts, although if there are extra keys they may not remap. You can also use the option key to trigger the accent marks. For instance, option-e followed by the letter e again will produce é, while option-c will produce ç. You can use Keyboard Viewer, accessible through the Input menu which can be turned on in System Preferences -> International to see the effects pressing the option key and/or the shift key will have on the character that will be typed.

jW

 

[Blackened Apple]

You can set it up to switch keyboard layouts, although if there are extra keys they may not remap. You can also use the option key to trigger the accent marks. For instance, option-e followed by the letter e again will produce é, while option-c will produce ç. You can use Keyboard Viewer, accessible through the Input menu which can be turned on in System Preferences -> International to see the effects pressing the option key and/or the shift key will have on the character that will be typed.

jW

Thank you very much for the helpful info

Cheers

 

[laetusviator]

In addition to the method Mal mentioned, OS X Lion also introduced a feature where you can simply hold a key down to get accent selection (like in iOS). So if you hold down the 'c' key, there's a pop-over that lets you select 'ç'.

(I wrote a little guide on accents in OS X that might be helpful.)

 

[Blackened Apple]

Wow, again thank you very much