French Type Helper

Even if you don’t know much about the French language, you probably heard of its accent and their importance. Generally speaking, the French accents are there to highlight pronunciation as well as indicate the difference between words that are spelled identically. French Type Helper is a tiny tool designed to help you spell the French accents via convenient shortcuts and without a dedicated French Input Method Editor (IME).

The tool doesn’t require installation, so just unzip the archive and run it. The app doesn’t have an interface and can be accessed from the System Tray, a desirable feat that makes sure you don’t get distracted. From here, you can Enable and Disable it with just one click. You will be happy to learn that the status of the tool is color coded with red for Disabled and green for Enabled.

Take note that the program includes some pre-defined hotkeys that you can easily change from the Settings. To remove a hotkey, select one of the commonly used key for this purpose (Ctrl, Alt or Shift) and set the other keys according to your needs and preferences.  If you are using French frequently, then you can configure the tool to start with Windows and enable the key mapping.

You can achieve the same results by enabling the French IME in Windows. Essentially, you need to access the Language from the Settings, find the Preferred languages and add the French language. However, as Microsoft points out, some languages may require additional package features to work, which may be the case for French sometimes.

French Type Helper is a lightweight utility that can come in handy if you need to write papers or anything else in the French language smoothly but you don’t know the key combinations.