Trying to write German on an English keyboard proves to be hard. Entering umlauts like ä and ß is not easy.
This program will insert umlauts in your clipboard. You can copy your text, run this program, then paste your German text.
Replacements done by this program:
AE - Ä
aE - ä
OE - Ö
oE - ö
UE - Ü
uE - ü
sS - ß
Note that the replacement only happens when the second letter is upper-case.
Except in abbreviations, this should rarely happen in regular text. We cannot
use the more common way of writing for example ue for ü because words like
neue would turn into neü which is not what we want.
Installation
go install github.com/gonutz/germanate@latest
Intrgration with Ubuntu
For easy access I added this program to my favorites in Ubuntu. This way it appears in my search results and I have an icon for it on the launch bar. I can thus either:
- Press the super key and search for it by typing germanate
- Click the favorite icon with the mouse
- Hit super key + 5 (it is my 5th icon)
to translate my texts.
To add it you must create this file
/usr/share/applications/germanate.desktop
with this content
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Germanate
Comment=Translate German umlauts in the clipboard
Exec=/home/me/go/bin/germanate
Icon=/home/me/go/bin/germanate.png
Terminal=false
Modify the Exec path accordingly. The Icon is optional and not provided by this repo. You can remove that line or create an icon yourself.
Now make the file executable
sudo chmod +x /usr/share/applications/germanate.desktop
After this you can search for Germanate, right click the search result icon and say Add to Favorites.