Russian Phonetic Keyboard
I recently transitioned back to Windows after using a series of Macs for about 10 years. Incidentally, I cannot feel happier about the change: I was fed up with having to overpay for software with beautiful user interfaces but very few customization features versus comparable systems. The tipping point for me was when I tried to upgrade my aging MacBook Air and I was imposed the new M1 chip, which promised marginal speed and battery life improvements… but forced me to purchase again licenses for 80% of my applications. Zero options, as usual with the company from Cupertino, take it or leave it. So I left, and I am now reusing some applications that are more than a decade old, admittedly sporting mediocre user interfaces, but cover all my needs and additionally provide plenty of tweaking space to streamline workflows. How is that for a good deal, Apple?
Now one of the things that I really missed in Windows is a decent Russian Phonetic Keyboard. I got used to the Russian Phonetic layout that comes by default in Mac OS X because all Russian letters bind to single keystrokes that, for the most part, are also homophonic with the English letter. And that speeds up a lot the learning for those of us for which Russian is not their first language (it is the seventh for me, so it is getting a bit crowded up there and optimizations are very welcome).
Existing Options
The Windows 10 built-in Russian Mnemonic Layout is ok, but has completely another way of typing Cyrillic letters using English letters. And having to learn again most of the keystrokes is a non-starter.
The WinRus website has some pretty good Russian keyboards for Windows, and some of them get very close to the Mac distribution, in particular the ЯШЕРТЫ “Student” keyboard, but ultimately also fall short in the attribution of some letters like Щ, Ж or the soft sign ь.
Getting closer to the goal, Nikolay Yurin posted in Medium his own adaptation of the WinRus keyboard that corrects the issues mentioned above and is, as far as I know, the closest that there is in the whole wide web.
Good job Nikolay! However there are still some shortcomings as compared to the original that limit its usability:
- RIGHT ALT (ALTGR) + e should map to ё (which sounds like “yo”) instead of е (which sounds like “ye”).
- The keystrokes that are taken over by the additional Cyrillic letters should keep their original symbols but moved to the ALTGR switch. That is, the English key [ maps now to ю, and { to Ю, but ALTGR + key should map to the original [, and ALTGR + SHIFT + key to {, in order to preserve the access to these symbols without having to change the entire keyboard.
My Own Take
As Nikolai says very well, “If you can’t find something, make it by yourself”. So I downloaded the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator in order to implement these last tweaks. Shame on Microsoft, the Layout Creator is a piece of abandonware that is not very well maintained and you have to be careful in order to make it work on Windows 10. Particularly:
- Install and run it always with Administrative privileges.
- Install it in a path of your hard disk that has no spaces in the names. For instance, if you install it in “C:\Keyboard Layout” it will not work. It has to be in “C:\KeyboardLayout”. Yup, old school… and pretty annoying.
In any case, here is the end result. It does the job extremely well. I called it the “Russmac” keyboard. You can download it from the following link:
The layout of the keys is exactly as you would expect in Mac:
Hope it works well for you, and наслаждайтесь написанием на этом прекрасном языке! :)
Oh and by the way if you ever need to remove they keyboard layout from your system, you can find it in the “Add or Remove Programs” menu as you would with any standard application.
Mobile Keyboard
There is no default Russian Phonetic keyboard in mobile; the Russian keyboard that comes in Android the standard ЙЦУКЕН layout that is completely different, but it becomes less of a problem because of the different way of typing on the screen.
However, when I am on the road I often put my phone on a stand and use a Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard for increased productivity. My personal favorite is the ultra-thin Moko keyboard, but regardless of the model it makes a huge difference for emails and messaging applications.
In this case, the keyboard layout problem returns. The practical solution that I found is using External Keyboard Helper Pro. This is a paid application that installs as a new system keyboard and has a trove of options to modify its behavior to suit our needs — even beyond the layout, things like the responsiveness to repeated keystrokes that become increasingly important the more you use this “Mobile Office” configuration.
Adapting External Keyboard Helper
Unfortunately the app does not have an option to export / import ready made layouts, but it is not too complicated to adapt the default options in order to re-create exactly the Phonetic Mac Layout that we were discussing above. Follow these instructions:
- First select Russian (Phonetic) as keyboard layout
- Customize keyboard mappings and save it as Custom 1
- Key 12 map to ь (0x044c)
- Key 13 map to ъ (0х044а) and SHIFT to Ъ (0x042а)
- Key 17 map to ш (0x0448) and SHIFT to Ш (0x0428)
- Key 18 map ALTGR to ё (0х00еb) and ALTGR + SHIFT to Ë (0x00cb)
- Key 26 map to ю (0х044е) and SHIFT to Ю (0х042е)
- Key 27 map to ж (0х0436) and SHIFT to Ж (0х0416)
- Key 41 map to щ (0x0449) and SHIFT to Щ (0х0429)
- Choose the Keyboard Layout Custom 1
Это всё. Enjoy!
