Swedish letters on ANSI keyboards

As somewhat of a "keyboard enthusiast", I am occasionally forced to use a keyboard with an ANSI layout, which is clearly inferior to the ISO layout:

It is missing a whole key:

Swedish/Finnish layout: <>|
UK layout: \|

One key is located all the way to the right, further away than any other key, making it very hard to press:

Swedish/Finnish layout: '*
UK layout: #~

Furthermore, the ANSI (US) layout is missing the Swedish letters å, ä and ö. On this page, I collect various ways of solving these problems:

Adding å, ä and ö to the US layout
Modifying the Swedish layout
Other methods

As an extra note, if you're not familiar with the Swedish/Finnish layout, here is a picture. Note the extra key next to the left Shift key, as well as the key placement around the Return key:

Adding å, ä and ö to the US layout

The most obvious approach is to start with the US layout and add the necessary Swedish letters to it.

The best approach, in my opinion, is to put these letters on the [{, ]} and \| keys, relegating the original characters to a layer accessed by holding Right Alt. This can be done using the following AutoHotkey code:

SC01A::å
SC01B::ä
SC02B::ö
+SC01A::Å
+SC01B::Ä
+SC02B::Ö
>!SC01A::SendInput, [
>!SC01B::SendInput, ]
>!SC02B::SendInput, \
>!+SC01A::SendInput, {{}
>!+SC01B::SendInput, {}}
>!+SC02B::SendInput, |

This method has two drawbacks:

The ä and ö keys are moved from their normal positions on the Swedish keyboard layout, which are occupied by the '" and ;: keys in the US layout.
The ö key is somewhat hard to reach.
Not all of the characters included in the Swedish layout are accessible – for example, the dead ´, `, ¨, ^, and ~ keys. Dead keys cannot easily be added with AutoHotkey.

On the other hand, å, ä and ö have not always been located at those positions. On typewriters, it is common to see them in a straight line to the right of the m key, where the comma, period and hyphen are located on the modern Swedish layout.

Furthermore, there are several great benefits of the above approach:

The replaced characters are used relatively rarely in normal writing.
The physical legends on the key caps match the corresponding characters very well.

To me, the correspondence between the key cap legend and the typed character is very important, even though I touch type. For that reason, this method is my favorite.

Modifying the Swedish layout

Another approach is to use the Swedish/Finnish layout in the operating system, with a couple of modifications. The following AutoHotkey code represents a couple of such modifications:

§::<
½::>
<^>§::|
*<^>1::SendInput, §
*<^>!::SendInput, ½
¨::'
^::*
'::¨
<^>*::~

Here is a summary of the changes:

The §½ key, which I very rarely use, is remapped in order to replace the lost <>| key. The original characters are available via AltGr on the adjacent 1! key. Unfortunately, the §½ key is not very close to the <>| key, but at least it is still on the same side of the keyboard.
The ¨^~ and '* keys are swapped. I use the '* key very often, and it is extremely annoying to have it all the way to the right.

This approach has a couple of advantages:

You can type all the characters available in the Swedish layout.
The å, ä and ö keys – along with most other keys – are at their usual positions.

However, it also has a significant disadvantage:

The legends on the key caps correspond extremely poorly to the actual typed characters.

Other methods

Andreas Hallberg bases his custom layout on the American one, replacing the [{, '" and :; keys with åÅ, äÄ and öÖ, and accessing the lost punctuation characters via double-tapping – how creative! He does it only in Vim, but I'm sure one could implement the same in AutoHotKey.

Last updated on 21 Dec 2020.