Typing åäö in Hyprland: A US, Mac-style Keyboard Guide

Published June 12, 2025

3 min read

Tags: swedish, keyboard

Intro

As I've mentioned in the previous GPT Changelog nee Weekly Summary, I have been learning Swedish for over 6 months now. I'm getting pretty good at listening and reading, but I have been doing very little speaking and typing practice. I would like to change that by building muscle memory through proper Swedish typing.

Enabling in Hyprland

Like many things in the Linux world, there is more than one way to do this. The easiest way would just be to use the GUI menu and add the keyboard. I would prefer to keep this declarative and inside some config files so it's more easily reproducible.

Instead, I will add some config to Hyprland to enable this. This config will:

• enable the Swedish kb_layout
• add the US variant for the Swedish layout
• sets rctrl as the key that toggles between layouts
• sets ralt as the modifier key for Swedish keys

input {
  kb_layout = us,se
  kb_variant = ,us
  kb_options = grp:rctrl_toggle,lv3:ralt_switch
}

Save the config and reload the hypr config: hyprctl reload

What is the US variant?

Before testing it out, I should explain what the US variant is.

The Swedish (US) layout — sometimes referred to as "Swedish for US keyboards" — is a variant of the traditional Swedish keyboard layout that’s specifically designed for people using US physical keyboards. It allows you to type Swedish characters like å, ä, and ö without rearranging the rest of your familiar QWERTY key positions.

This layout keeps the standard US punctuation and symbol positions intact — like /, @, ;, and " — while introducing the necessary Swedish characters via the Right Alt key (also called AltGr in XKB terminology).

Unlike the default Swedish layout, which assumes a physical keyboard with keys labeled for Swedish (and repositions many punctuation marks), the Swedish (US) layout overlays the Swedish characters on a standard US keyboard. This makes it ideal for:

• Swedish learners or expats using American keyboards
• Developers or typists who need occasional access to å, ä, and ö
• Anyone who doesn’t want to remap common keys like @, |, or /

In practice, this means you keep your normal US key behavior, and just use Right Alt as a modifier to access Swedish characters:

• Right Alt + w = å
• Right Alt + ' = ä
• Right Alt + ; = ö

And uppercase versions with Shift.

If you’re used to US QWERTY and want to type Swedish without sacrificing developer-friendly symbols, Swedish (US) is the best option available — and it integrates smoothly into Linux environments like Hyprland when configured correctly.

🇸🇪 Swedish (US) Layout – Character Cheat Sheet

Conclusion

You should now have a working Hyprland config that will allow you to type Swedish on a Mac-style, US variant keyboard.