How to type keyboard shortcuts like ⌘Ä, ⌘Ö, ⌘Ü, etc. on a US keyboard?

Question

I'm using a Mac laptop with German set as the preferred language (the keyboard, however, is a standard US keyboard). With this setting, some keyboard shortcuts include the characters Ä, Ö, and Ü. E.g. ⌘Ä (command-Ä), ⌘Ö (command-Ö), ⌘Ü (command-Ü), etc.

Now, I produce Ä by first pressing ⌥-u (Option-u), and then pressing ⇧-a (Shift-a). I can't figure out any way of using this method to produce the equivalent of ⌘Ä (command-Ä). The same goes for for Ö and Ü.

Is there some way to produce these keyboard shortcuts on a US keyboard?

Answer 1

You can change the shortcuts from System Preferences:

They can also be changed with defaults. The shortcut format is described in the Cocoa Text System article.

#!/bin/bash

defaults write -g NSUserKeyEquivalents '{
"Vorherigen Tab auswahlen" = "~@\UF702";
"Nächsten Tab auswahlen" = "~@\UF703";
"Zurück" = "@\UF702";
"Vorwärts" = "@\UF703";
}'

Answer 2

This may seem metaphysical, but you cannot press a key that does not exist. Despite the lack of a physical Ä key on the U.S. Keyboard, you can, however set the keyboard layout to the German keyboard layout. Alternately, you could create a modified keyboard layout starting from the standard U.S. Keyboard layout that includes a Ä key.

The operation of changing the layout is the simplest to accomplish:

• Go to System Preferences » Language & Text » Input Sources
• Enable the German layout (and also make sure the "Show Input menu in menu bar" box is checked).
• In the Input menu, select the German layout.

Then, pressing the physical ⌘' keys will produce the ⌘Ä sequence. Likewise for ⌘; producing ⌘Ö and ⌘[ producing ⌘Ü. After typing that keystroke, you can use the menu to switch back to your desired keyboard layout.