---
title: "emacs mac umlauts"
seo_description: "How to type umlauts in emacs on mac"
date: 2021-11-05T13:50:36+01:00
draft: false
snippet_types:
- emacs
---

Recently I've been writing a lot for the German side of my personal site. When typing in German 
I perfer to use the English QWERTY keyboard and just alt-u-u to type "ü". The problem I was having
was emacs would intercept this and execute the capitalize-word function 😞. After some digging into
my configs, ~/.doom.d/config.el, I was able to unset **M-u** only problem is it still didn't activate
the mac system umlaut feature.

```emacs
(global-unset-key (kbd "M-u"))
```

Finally after some more digging I found:

```emacs
(setq ns-alternate-modifier 'none
      ns-right-alternate-modifier 'meta)
```

It works by un-assigning the left alt to meta, allowing the system keyboard feature to kick in.

source: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/61019/umlauts-in-emacs-on-mac