Guide

Telex table

Type the mark after the letter, anywhere in the word: truowfng, truongwf and truwowngf all give trường. Pressing the tone key twice removes the tone and keeps the letter: vaff gives vaf.

Tone placement

By default MiKey uses the modern placement: hoà, thuý, khoẻ. For the classic one (hòa, thúy, khỏe) turn off "Bỏ dấu kiểu mới" in the input menu on the Mac.

Switching language

• ⌥+Z on the Mac, Alt+Z on Windows: Vietnamese ↔ English/German. On the Mac a small VI or EN shows at the cursor.
• On the Mac also from the input menu: Tiếng Việt (Telex) or English / Deutsch.
• After you switch by hand, MiKey doesn't switch by itself for 5 seconds, so your choice holds.

How MiKey recognises English and German

1. MiKey only decides when a word ends: a space, punctuation (, . ; : ? ! ) ") or Enter.
2. In Vietnamese mode: if your keys are a real English or German word and the Vietnamese reading is rare or impossible, the keys come back and MiKey switches to English/German. text → text, wir → wir.
3. In English/German mode: if you type a clearly Vietnamese word, MiKey adds the marks and switches back. treen → trên, ddi hocj → đi học.
4. When a word has two readings (car / cả, too / tô), MiKey looks at the word before it and uses the reading that is more common in real text.
5. Common Vietnamese words are never switched to English or German.

ä ö ü and dead keys

On ä ö ü ß é è à ç or a dead key (´ ` ^ ¨), MiKey puts back the keys typed so far and turns Telex off until the word ends. So über, fährt, Grüße, Café, Zürich are always right, even inside a Vietnamese sentence: đi học ở Zürich.

German detection

On by default. MiKey knows about 30,000 German words, also written without umlauts (fuer, schoen) and with the Swiss ss (Strasse). On the Mac, turn it off in the input menu: Nhận biết tiếng Đức.

Undo with Backspace

Right after MiKey changes a word, press Backspace once: the word is back exactly as you typed it and the language is as before. If you keep typing on that word, MiKey checks the whole word again.

Tips

• Acronyms and capitalised names: words with two or more capitals stay as typed (NAS, HDD, USA, GoPro). Whole sentences with Caps Lock still become Vietnamese: TOOI DDI HOCJ → TÔI ĐI HỌC.
• Code, files, paths: words after . _ - / stay as typed: file.txt, my_var, git push.
• Numbers: 5trawm → 5trăm; 100k and md5sum stay.
• Words with two readings: type them in capitals (GIF, HDD), or switch with ⌥Z/Alt+Z first.

Kept Vietnamese on purpose

A few words are both common Vietnamese and English/German. MiKey prefers Vietnamese, because a wrongly switched Vietnamese word is more annoying:

After a German word, ist stays ist: das ist gut. A word often comes out wrong? Report it on GitHub.