Step by step
How to use the russian keyboard
- 1The keyboard above is already set to Russian; you can switch language from the list if you need another.
- 2Click the keys on screen, or just type — your own keyboard is remapped to the layout shown.
- 3Use Shift for the second layer, which carries the rest of the characters.
- 4Copy the text when you are done, or download it as a .txt file.
Why type Russian in a browser
Adding Russian to an operating system is a settings-menu expedition that ends in a keyboard you cannot see: the letters are not printed on your keys, so you are typing blind in a script you may have no muscle memory for, and you have changed a system-wide setting to write one line.
The usual workaround is worse — hunting characters in a character-map utility and pasting them one at a time, or copying words out of search results and hoping the spelling survived the trip.
A visible keyboard solves the specific problem of writing Russian occasionally: searching for something in Russian when your keyboard has no Cyrillic on it, typing a name, a place or an address correctly, or writing a short message or filling in a Russian-language field. Every key is on screen, the arrangement is the standard one, and when you are finished there is nothing to undo.
ЙЦУКЕН, which is Cyrillic's QWERTY
The Russian layout is called ЙЦУКЕН after its first six keys, exactly as QWERTY is named after its own. It is the standard arrangement on every Russian keyboard and has been since the typewriter, so it is what any Russian typist knows.
It is not phonetic. The к is not on the k key and the м is not on the m key, because the layout was arranged for Russian letter frequencies rather than for Latin correspondence. Learning it by position is the only way it works, and the small grey letters on each key show which of your keys produces what.
Both cases are here. Cyrillic has capitals, and Shift produces them as you would expect — Москва takes a capital М.
ё, ъ and the letters people skip
ё is written inconsistently in Russian. Formally it is a distinct letter, and сёстры is not сестры; in practice most printed Russian writes е for both and leaves the reader to work it out. On this layout ё sits alone at the top left, off the main block, which reflects exactly how marginal it has become.
The hard sign ъ and the soft sign ь are real letters that change pronunciation and meaning, and both have keys. They are easy to leave off if you are typing from sound rather than from spelling, and подъезд without its ъ is simply misspelled.
Three pairs look like Latin letters and are not: Cyrillic а е о р с х against Latin a e o p c x. They are different codepoints. A word typed with a Latin о inside it looks perfect and will not match anything.
Transliteration, and why it is not a substitute
Typing Russian as "Moskva" rather than Москва is a habit from the era when systems could not handle Cyrillic, and it survives in email addresses, file names and older databases. There is no single standard for it: the same name transliterates several ways depending on which scheme you follow, which is why one person's surname can appear in three spellings across three documents.
Cyrillic itself has no such ambiguity. Москва is Москва. Where a form or a search will accept Cyrillic, using it removes a whole class of matching problems.
The older encoding mess — KOI8-R, Windows-1251, and the mojibake they produced when confused with each other — is largely behind us. Unicode Cyrillic, which this board writes, is what everything now expects.
Type it, click it, or both
There are two ways to use the board and they work together. Click the keys on screen when you are hunting for a letter, and type on your own keyboard when you know where it is — your keys are remapped to the Russian layout either way, so switching between the two mid-word changes nothing.
The remapping is matched by physical key position, which is what makes it survive a non-QWERTY system underneath. A checkbox turns it off if you would rather type Latin into the same box.
None of it leaves your browser. The layouts are a small amount of data in the page and every keystroke is handled locally, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to trust with a name you are trying to spell correctly.
Answers
Frequently asked questions
Is the Russian layout phonetic?
No. ЙЦУКЕН is arranged for Russian letter frequency, not to match Latin keys. The grey letter on each key shows which of your keys produces it.
Where is ё?
Alone at the top left, off the main block — which reflects how often it is written at all. Formally it is a separate letter from е.
Why does my Russian word not match in a search?
Often because a Latin lookalike slipped in. Cyrillic а е о р с х are different characters from Latin a e o p c x, even though they are identical on screen.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. The on-screen layout is the one you tap, and the device's own keyboard is kept from opening on top of it so it does not cover the keys.
Can I use my own keyboard instead?
Yes, and it is on by default. Keys are remapped by physical position, so it lands correctly even if you already run AZERTY or Dvorak.