Writing anything in Spanish on my Mac has always been a pain. It would help if I had a Spanish keyboard but I don’t. In my previous attempts I have always reverted to selecting the appropriate accented character from the character palette. It’s a slow process! However, I have just found out how it can be done using the keyboard. Here’s a brief list of some of the more common accented characters in Spanish and how to write them:

• Option key + e, release then “e” → é
• Option key + n, release then “n” → ñ
• Option key + e, release then “o” → ó
• Option key + Shift + “?” → ¿

Of course I use a Kinesis keyboard which doesn’t have the Option key, or any other Mac specific keys for that matter, so I have to keep leaning over to my laptop to get at the appropriate key(s) but it’s a start.

You can find more codes at this site.