I’ve recently gotten back into building mechanical keyboards but now fully handwired and in 3d printed enclosures but I find myself struggling with something I use a lot – typing currency symbols. I use a US layyout because somehow that is what I’m used to, but as a British person living in Europe I also need to type the Euro (EUR) currency symbol and British Pound (GPB) symbol from time to time and couldn’t quite figure it out – the easiest solution was always to either open the character map or just google “euro symbol” and copy paste it. Obviously you can change your keyboard settings in windows to use another layout but then things like the @ and # symbols move around. Not ideal.
Today this changed. I spent a bit of time digging around and learnt that in Windows you can type most unicode symbols by turning on numlock, holding down Alt and typing a numeric sequence, but only if you have a numeric keypad (which I don’t!). Luckily, you can still put number keys on layers in the KMK keyboard firmware and if you are feeling brave you can even mash them into a macro to automatically type complex sequences!
So here is the macro to type the Euro symbol in KMK
KC.MACRO(Tap(KC.NUMLOCK), Press(KC.LALT), Tap(KC.KP_0), Tap(KC.KP_1), Tap(KC.KP_2), Tap(KC.KP_8), Release(KC.LALT), Tap(KC.NUMLOCK))and this is the macro to type the British Pound symbol in KMK
KC.MACRO(Tap(KC.NUMLOCK), Press(KC.LALT), Tap(KC.KP_0), Tap(KC.KP_1), Tap(KC.KP_6), Tap(KC.KP_3), Release(KC.LALT), Tap(KC.NUMLOCK))Unfortunately, these don’t work on MacOS, but I will update this post if I figure out a solution!