Windows – My windows keyboard is being “clever” with the quote keys – how can I stop it

input-languageskeyboardwindows 7

I'm using windows 7 on a laptop. On the laptop keyboard, for some reason, the quote key (which has both double and single quote on it) is doing some "clever" annoying things:

  1. When I press single-quote (or double-quote), windows doesn't send any characters until I press it twice (resulting in '' or "")
  2. When I press it before a vowel, I get some kind of accented character. As I usually only write English, this is annoying.

The backtick/tilde key is subject to similar behaviour.

This is not a duplicate of the linked question because the two problems have completely different solutions. This question was caused by an internationalisation setting being activated; that other question was caused by keys being set to dead.

I have not attempted to set up my computer to process anything other than English. My keyboard appears to be (in so far as these things are standard on laptops) a standard US qwerty keyboard.

How can I stop this happening?

Best Answer

I would first make sure that your "input method" settings is set to "US" (and definitely not "United States-International"). You can do this through the Control Panel. A restart may be required.

For Windows 7:

  1. Open Control Panel
  2. Click on Clock, Language, and Region, and then Region and Language.
  3. Click the Keyboards and Languages tab, and then click Change keyboards.
  4. Under Installed services, click Add.
  5. Double-click the language you want to add, double-click Keyboard, select the text services options you want to add, and then click OK.

See also:

For Windows 10:

  1. Open Control Panel.
  2. Click on Clock, Language, and Region and then click on Language.
  3. If you don't see a card reading "English (United States)" in the list, click on "Add a language" on the toolbar to add it.
  4. On the same row belonging to the "English (United States)" card, make sure there is a line reading "Keyboard layout: US". If it does not (that's the assumption of this answer), click on the "Options" hyperlink belonging to the same line, to the left.
  5. In the "Input method" section, click on the "Add an input method" hyperlink to add a keyboard layout called "US". Delete any other installed input methods pertaining English.

See also:

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