In the language of Molière, the capital letters keep their accent or their cedilla. Unfortunately our keyboards are not practical for writing accented capital letters, unless you know the right tools.
Unlike English, French has many special characters, such as accented, linked or cedilated letters, which are also called diacritics. However, if some have a dedicated key on the keyboard (é, à, ù), others are not entitled to it and in particular the accented capital letters (É, À, Ô or Ç). These special characters are then quite painful to enter, especially in Windows, because the operating system still does not offer an easy method to do this in 2025.
To write these special letters with the Microsoft system, you have to use a convoluted key combination, like Alt + 0192 for À or Alt + 128 for Ç, which is frankly unintuitive and difficult to memorize for all the characters possible. You can also install a utility like PowerToys, which contains a tool dedicated to special characters, but this is not very responsive and not very suitable when you need to write a lot and quickly.
However, there are many keyboard layouts specifically designed to facilitate the entry of accented capital letters and other French diacritical marks (such as cedillas). One of the best known comes from the Linux world and is called fr-oss. This arrangement allows quick access to almost any accented capital letter, such as É, À or Ô, to the famous Ç, or to particular mathematical symbols such as ≤ (less than or equal to) and ≥ (greater than or equal to has).
Each character key (the white ones in the image below) allows you to write up to four characters or symbols, accessible as follows: single press for the symbol at the bottom left of the key; Shift + press for the symbol at the top left; Alt Gr + press for the one at the bottom right; Alt Gr + Shift + press for the one at the top right. If the manipulation requires a little practice, it is in any case much simpler than remembering all the Alt combinations of Windows, and much faster to enter than the dedicated PowerToys tool.
Good news, several transpositions for Windows of this keyboard layout have been created and made available by generous users on the Web. You will easily find some by typing “fr-oss windows” on a search engine, like that of Michel Julier or evenEric Bugnet. It is the latter that we will use for our example, because although it dates from 2013, we still use it daily on several of our computers, and it still works perfectly.
Start by downloading the installation files from this linkthen unzip the file fr-oss.zipopen it then double-click on the file setup.exe. If Windows displays a blue warning window, first click Additional information then on Run anywayand also validate the window of User Account Control which should appear. After a few moments and once the process is complete, a window should tell you that the installation was successful.
If so, then a new keyboard layout has been added to your computer, and you can activate it in several ways. In the taskbar on the right you may see the letters “FRA” (or “ENG” if you are using your keyboard in English mode), click on it to bring up a drop-down list which should contain an entry French (like fr-oss). Click on it to select this keyboard layout and test how it works.
If you like this layout, you can set it as your computer’s default, so you don’t have to select it manually. On Windows 11, go to Settings > Time & Language > Typing > Advanced keyboard settings and select French (like fr-oss) in the drop-down list. And on Windows 10, go to Settings > Time & Language > Language > Keyboard Then French (like fr-oss) in the drop-down list.
On the contrary, if you ultimately don’t like this layout, you can very easily remove it from your computer. On Windows 11, go to Settings > Time and language, click on the three dots to the right of French (France) then on Language optionsgo down until you find French (like fr-oss) and click again on the three dots on the right then finally on DELETE.
The path is almost identical on Windows 10: first go to Settings > Time & Language > Languagethen click French (like fr-oss) and then on the button Options. On the page that opens, scroll down until you find the section Keyboardsclick French (like fr-oss) and finally on the button DELETE. You will then be rid of the fr-oss layout, but you can of course reinstall it in the future if you feel like it.