Accents for Google Chrome™ — Special Characters & Symbols
ID
fcpchhmnlkbfpgjnfmeooccffcienlgbType accents, symbols and IPA straight into any text box. Works offline, collects nothing.
Extension information
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Description
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.