As I wrote in my (excruciatingly long and bor­ing) ar­ti­cle on the Nepali lan­guage and Unicode, typing in Nepali does­n’t have to be a pain. You are ab­solutely free to make your own key­board lay­out to type in Nepali Unicode (which, by the way, has much bet­ter fonts than Preeti and Sagarmatha). In fact, a few months ago, I made my own key­board lay­out be­cause there’s no way I’m go­ing to be able to cram the ran­dom key map­pings of the tra­di­tional Nepali typ­ing lay­out. Sorry dad, your son has re­nounced an­ces­tral typ­ing for good.

The lay­out I made is heav­ily based on the LTK’s pho­netic key­board lay­out (which is quite good on it’s own). I made my lay­out to help me write code in the मनसा pro­gram­ming lan­guage. If you’d like to try out the lan­guage or the key­board lay­out in your browser, head over to mnsa.cc.

Download the Keyboard layout

The key­board lay­out is as sys­tem­atic and fluid as I could make it. You should be able to get a grasp for the lay­out in about half an hour. Here are a few point­ers to help you learn quicker.

• Nepali consonants are generally placed right in the key where their English consonant counterparts live. So क is in key 'k', प is in key 'p', च is in key 'c' and so on.
• Aspirate counterparts of consonants live in the uppercase letters. So ख which is the aspirate counterpart of क lives in capital 'K' key. Similarly छ which is aspirate counterpart to च lives in capital 'C' key.
• Half-forms (न्‍, च्‍, क्‍ etc) are automatically formed when you use the हलन्त character, which is in the key '/'. For more information on this mechanism, consult my article on Unicode.
• क्ष, त्र, ज्ञ, and श्र are compound consonants. Get them by typing in the constituent characters: क्‌ष, त्‌र, ज्‌ञ, and श्‌र respectively.
• There are some inconsistencies because some distinct Nepali phonemes are allophones for the English language. For example both ड and द are 'D' in English. To mitigate this issue, the letter ड had to be moved to an unused key 'x'. I'm sorry this had to be done but it has to be done.
• Important: आ is not the same as अा. There's a separate key for आ. Don't first type in अ then the ा key separately. Avoid this minor mistake to not seem like a middle-aged parent who has just learnt to use Facebook.

Download for Windows here

To in­stall this key­board on Windows, just down­load the lay­out, un­zip, in­stall us­ing ‘setup’ file. You might have to re­boot af­ter in­stalling. Then:

• Go to Start menu and click on Settings.
• Click on Time & language (Speech, region, date).
• Find and open Region & language settings.
• Under Languages, click on + Add a language.
• Find and choose नेपाली Nepali.
• Click on नेपाली (नेपाल) Nepali (Nepal).
• Pick the keyboard layout by clicking on the keyboard icon and selecting 'np-nirav'.
• You're done. Have fun typing in Nepali.
• PS: You might have to take some obvious extra steps. I don't remember much because it has been a long time since I used Windows.