Virtual keyboard

One tool, thirteen languages

This keyboard types the thirteen languages this site is written in, and for each of them it renders the layout people in that language actually use — chosen by a simple rule: the standard layout of the country with the most speakers. Hebrew is the SI-1452 standard, French is AZERTY, German is QWERTZ, Russian is ЙЦУКЕН, Spanish is the Latin American layout, Portuguese is the Brazilian ABNT2, Turkish is Turkish Q, Japanese is the JIS kana layout and Korean is Dubeolsik. The picker lists every layout by its own name in its own language, because a reader hunting for their language recognises its endonym in any interface.

One entry is deliberately unexciting: Indonesian. Indonesia has no national keyboard layout — the country types on US QWERTY, the same layout as English — and the honest answer is to say so rather than invent a layout no Indonesian has ever seen. The tool opens with the layout of the language you are reading it in, and you can switch to any of the others at any time; the text you have typed stays put when you do.

Positional mapping: your own layout does not matter

Type on your physical keyboard and the tool reads each key by its position on the board, never by the character your operating system thinks it produces. The key two rows up from the space bar, one to the right of J — the K position — types k under US QWERTY and ל under the Hebrew layout, whatever layout your machine has installed. That inversion is the whole point: if the tool listened to the operating system it would just echo your own layout back at you, and it could never type a language you have no layout installed for.

A click on an on-screen key and a press on the physical board go through exactly the same machinery, so the two can never disagree about what a key does. While you type physically, the key you pressed lights up on the on-screen keyboard — which is how you learn where the characters of an unfamiliar layout live, the same way a printed keyboard sticker used to teach it.

Capture is deliberately narrow. Physical keys are read only while the text box has focus, so the rest of the page keeps working normally. Shortcuts such as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A and Ctrl+Z pass straight through to the browser, as do the arrow keys, Home, End and Delete — and Tab is never swallowed, because a tool that eats Tab traps anyone navigating by keyboard on the page.

One thing a physical board can be short of is keys. The European layouts here are ISO boards: they carry a 102nd key between the left Shift and the first letter of the bottom row, and the Brazilian ABNT2 adds a 49th beside the right Shift. A US-style ANSI keyboard has neither, so no press of yours reaches them — but they are drawn on the on-screen keyboard like every other key, and clicking one types exactly what the layout puts there. Nothing in a layout is unreachable; on the wrong board a little of it is mouse-only.

Layers: Shift, Caps Lock, AltGr and dead keys

A real keyboard types more characters than it has keys, and it does that with layers. Holding Shift while you press a key types the Shift layer; clicking the on-screen Shift instead latches it for exactly one character, the way on-screen keyboards behave everywhere. Caps Lock is narrower than people assume: it capitalises only the keys where the Shift layer really is the upper case of the base letter, so it turns a into A but never turns 1 into !. On a script with no letter case at all — Hebrew is one — Caps Lock does nothing, which is what a real Hebrew keyboard does too.

The European layouts carry a third layer reached with AltGr, where characters such as @, € and the bracket pairs live, and dead keys with the standard behaviour: press the accent, then the letter, and the two compose — dead key then space yields the bare mark, and a letter the accent cannot join simply arrives after it. A pending dead key is shown as waiting on the on-screen keyboard, so the silence between the two presses is visible rather than confusing.

Two Hebrew details look like bugs and are the standard. The layout mirrors its paired delimiters — Shift+9 types ) where US QWERTY types ( — because the standard maps the logical character and the bidirectional text algorithm mirrors it back when the text is drawn; the key that looks like an opening bracket produces an opening bracket on screen. And the text box itself flips to right-to-left when you pick Hebrew or Arabic, because direction belongs to the text being typed, not to the language of the page around it.

Japanese and Korean are input methods, not just layouts

For most languages a keyboard is a table: one key position, one character. Korean and Japanese need more than a table. Korean Dubeolsik types jamo — individual consonants and vowels — and an input method composes them into syllable blocks as you go: ㅎ then ㅏ then ㄴ becomes 한, compound vowels and double final consonants assemble the same way, and a final consonant is carried into the next syllable when what follows makes that the right reading. Backspace walks the composition back jamo by jamo rather than deleting the whole syllable, because that is how every Korean input method behaves and anything else makes correcting a typo maddening.

Japanese comes in two modes. The default is romaji input on the physical keyboard — type ka and か appears, with the standard handling of the small っ and of ん — because that is how most Japanese typing actually happens. The on-screen keyboard shows the JIS kana layout, where each key is a syllable, and a positional JIS mode is there for anyone who really types that way. A toggle switches the output between hiragana and katakana.

What the tool deliberately does not do is convert kana to kanji. Real conversion needs a dictionary of hundreds of thousands of words and a ranking model on top — an IME, not a keyboard — and shipping a bad one would be worse than shipping none: you would get plausible, wrong text with no way to see it. Kana-only output is stated here plainly so the limit is understood rather than discovered.

Arabic keyboard, Hebrew keyboard, Russian keyboard: nothing to install

Positional mapping is what makes those three phrases mean something here. Pick the Arabic layout — listed under its own name, العربية — 101 — and every key on the board in front of you resolves against it instead of against your own: the five positions a US keyboard prints as L, V, P, F and H, pressed in that order, type مرحبا, whatever is engraved on them. Nothing is downloaded, no language pack is added and no system setting is touched, so switching the picker back leaves your own layout exactly where it was.

• The base layer is the letters, in the 101 arrangement. The position a US board prints as K types ن here, the same position that types ל under Hebrew and k under US QWERTY — one key, three layouts, three letters, and none of it decided by your operating system.
• Shift is where the short vowels live rather than capitals, because Arabic has no upper case to put there: the fatha, damma and kasra, their three tanwin forms, the sukun and the shadda. Every one of them is a combining mark, drawn on the letter in front of it rather than standing alone, so the letter is typed first and the mark second.
• Shift also carries the hamza forms أ‎, إ and آ, the three lam-alef ligatures that carry a hamza — the plain one sits on the base layer — and the Arabic comma, semicolon and question mark — ، ؛ ؟ — which are code points of their own rather than mirrored ASCII ones, so what you type is punctuated the way Arabic is written rather than the way English is.
• The J position on the Shift layer is the tatweel, the kashida: it lengthens the join between two letters instead of adding a sound, which is why a word that carries one is longer without being spelled differently.
• AltGr opens a third layer, which the Hebrew layout has none of. The digit row gives the Arabic-Indic digits ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩٠ while the base row keeps 1234567890, so both sets of digits are one modifier apart; the letter rows give the Persian and Urdu letters an Arabic board still needs — پ‎, چ‎, ژ‎, گ and ڤ — and the Arabic decimal and thousands separators.

Two things about this layout look like faults and are the script being described honestly. Caps Lock does nothing at all on Arabic, and nothing at all on Hebrew: it only ever governs a key whose Shift layer is the upper case of its base, and on a caseless script there is no such key anywhere on the board. And there is no dead key and no composition step here — unlike Korean and Japanese above, every Arabic key types its character the moment it is pressed, so nothing is ever waiting to be finished. The Hebrew SI-1452 layout and the Russian ЙЦУКЕН layout are chosen from the same list and typed exactly the same way.

Runs in your browser

The layouts are data shipped with the page and every keystroke is handled locally. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or logged — which matters more for a typing tool than for most, because what people type into a keyboard is often exactly the text they care about. Capture is scoped to the text box, so the tool never sees a key you press anywhere else, and closing the tab leaves nothing behind.