Accents for Google Chrome™ — Special Characters & Symbols

Type accents, symbols and IPA straight into any text box. Works offline, collects nothing.

Accents — Special Characters & Symbols Type é, ñ, ü, ß, € or the full IPA chart straight into any text box in Chrome. No copy-paste dance, no character-map window, no internet connection. This release is a complete rewrite, and it closes every defect we found in the old version. WHAT'S NEW Characters go where your cursor is. Click a character and it lands in the text box you were typing in, at the caret. It works in ordinary inputs and in the controlled inputs that React, Vue and Angular use, and it runs in every frame on the page. Copying still exists if you prefer it. When a page genuinely cannot be reached — Chrome's own settings pages, for instance — the character goes to your clipboard instead and the status bar says so, rather than failing silently. Hold a letter, the way your phone works. Hold "e" in any text field and a small row of accented forms appears; press a number or click to insert. This is the fastest way to type an accent and it never opens the popup at all. It is off by default and asks for its permission when you switch it on. Turning it off releases the permission again. Search that works. Search by Unicode name (acute), by plain-language alias (euro, dagger, tick, schwa), by code point (U+00E9), or by typing a letter and an accent mark — o~, c, or e'. That last form uses the same compose table as the hold-a-key shortcuts, so the two can never disagree about what a mark means. A sidebar of sets you choose. The old 29-tab strip is gone. Sets now live in a sidebar, each showing a representative character and its name, and you decide which ones appear. Pinned and Recent sit above whichever set is open as their own labelled blocks, so your most-used characters are always the first thing you see. Right-click any character to pin it for good. Know what you are looking at. The status bar names the character under your pointer — the glyph, its full Unicode name and its code point — so the difference between ’ and ' and ′ stops being guesswork. Everything from the keyboard. Arrow keys move, Enter inserts, Alt-Enter copies, the number keys 1-9 insert from the first row, "/" jumps to search and Escape clears it. Alt+Shift+A opens the picker from anywhere. Also new: a Help pane and an in-popup Settings pane; compose shortcuts (tap the apostrophe twice, then a letter); frequency-ranked recents; a preview buffer with insert-all and copy-all; dark mode following your system or set explicitly; per-site rules; custom sets of your own; a right-click menu listing your favourites; and sync of favourites and settings across your devices. FIXED The old version was broken in ways that were easy to miss. - 126 characters inserted an invisible tab character alongside the character you actually asked for. - The Recent list could never hold anything. Every entry was added and then immediately deleted, and the list was hidden, so nobody saw it fail. - Search was completely inert. Its index was never built. - The popup opened showing all 29 categories and 852 characters stacked into one window. - The footer permanently covered the last row of every category. - Clicking the popup background threw an error that aborted the handler. - Copying gave no feedback and swallowed its own failures. - 14 characters were duplicated across 13 categories. - Nothing was reachable by keyboard or labelled for screen readers. - Nothing persisted at all, because the extension had never asked for permission to store anything. - The hold-a-letter picker had been written but never switched on, and carried seven further defects — including one that overwrote your clipboard with the word "undefined". We also removed three copies of jQuery and one of Bootstrap, taking five known security vulnerabilities with them. The extension is now a third of its former size and carries no third-party code at all. The catalogue gained 266 uppercase accented letters. It previously had none — no É, Ñ, Ü, Ł or Ż — so it could not spell a capitalised word. It now holds 600 characters across 29 sets, each with its Unicode name, code point and search keywords. NOW IN YOUR LANGUAGE Every word of the interface is translated into 40 languages. Until now, eight were complete and the rest carried nothing but a name, so most people saw an English interface whatever their browser was set to. Two labels in the hold-a-letter picker had never been translated in any language at all. They are now. PRIVACY Accents collects nothing, sends nothing and works offline. There is no telemetry of any kind. Favourites and settings sync through your Chrome profile; your recent characters stay on this device. Access to the pages you visit is optional, and is requested only if you turn on the hold-a-letter picker. Switch that feature off and the permission is released.