Qwerty Keyboard Layout
for OS 10.2 and up

The following Qwerty Phonetic Yiddish Keyboard Layout was developed specifically for Yiddish, with full standard YIVO orthography, and is based on the standard US English Qwerty keyboard layout. It was developed by Jack (a/k/a Yosl) Juni (my brother!) and is being offered here as a free download. This is a beta version, meaning that we might add minor changes in the future.

• Click here to view a PDF file showing a rough pictorial layout of this Yiddish Qwerty Keyboard Layout.

• Click here to read a description of this layout.

• To Download this Yiddish Qwerty Keyboard Layout -- Click Here  [Note -- If you have already downloaded Shoshke-post, the email program, you do not need to download this keyboard again here, because it is included with the Shoshke-post download.]

• Keyboard installation instructions

Description of this Mac Qwerty Keyboard Layout:

The keyboard layout was constructed by  Jack (Yosl) Juni, based on a design by Shoshke-Rayzl Juni, which was based on a Phonetic Yiddish Keyboard used for other platforms for several years.  The original layout design was coordinated by Jack Halpern, with the help of Mark (Meyer) David, Raphael (Refoyl) Finkel, Susannah (Shoshke-Rayzl) Juni, Norman (Noyekh) Miller, and Dorothy (Dobe) Wasserman in consultation with members of the UYIP mailing list and participants of the Yugntruf Yidish-vokh 1998.  The current keyboard layout includes Yiddish punctuation marks.  Most Yiddish letters are arranged in a phonetic scheme based on QWERTY.  A "phonetic scheme based on qwerty" means that if you have an American English keyboard, you can easily find komets-alef by typing the letter "o" in the normal position, and a pasekh-alef   by typing the letter "a" in the normal position, etc. The remaining letters are equally easy to remember, increasing your learnng curve and Yiddish typing speed. Final keys (e.g., shlos-mem) are in the Shift position; e.g., shift+m.

• Yiddish quotation marks are at Shift + the 3 keys to the right of P (in place of the curly brackets, etc.). Garesh and gershayim are at the apostrophe key (adjacent to the Enter key), normal and Shift, respectively.  [Click here to see what garesh, gershayim, and Yiddish quotation marks are.]

• A makef (Yiddish hyphen) is found to the left of the number 1 on the top row. An alternative English hyphen is found on either the numeric keypad (the minus sign) or to the right of the top row zero key.  [Click here to see the difference between a makef (Yiddish hyphen) and an English hyphen.] An underline symbol (e.g., for making forms) is on shift+the key to the left of the number 1 in the top row. If you have a laptop, you might not have any key to the left of the number 1 on the top row; therefore the makef and the underline symbol are also located in shift + P and O, respectively. A long dash (en dash) is on the shift+hyphen key, to the right of the number 0 on the top row.

• Note that an American quote and apostrophe have been added to Option+C and Option+X, respectively, to aid in text searching in Yiddish documents where these characters have been used.

Keyboard installation instructions:

Following are instructions for installing this keyboard, or any imported OS X keyboard:

• Drag the Keyboard File(s) to the Desktop. (See download at top of this page, or download a keyboard from elsewhere.) [The above download unstuffs to a folder with 2 files.]
• Double-click on the Hard Drive.
• Open the Library.
• Open Keyboard Layouts.
• Drag the new Keyboard File(s) into Keyboard Layouts.
• Close the Hard Drive.
• Open the Apple Menu,
• Select System Preferences.
• Select Personal -- International.
• Go to the Tab for Input Menu.
• Scroll down to Unicode -- Yiddish Qwerty, near the bottom (or find the keyboard you're installing).
• Check the box on the left.
• Click on Language Tab, and go back to the Input Menu
• Hold Command + Q to quit.
• Apple menu -- Log out; Then click on your name to log back in.

That's it. Now, you can always select the new keyboard from any application by clicking on the American flag (assuming you have a default of American English) to change keyboard layouts.

Back to Mac OS 10.2 and up

• Back to A Users' Guide to Yiddish on the Internet for an overview.