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Comment by cjauvin | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of the compose key, both for its universality and intuitive "syntax". For many years I endured the pain of a dual French/US keyboard layout (one for writing, the other for coding), until a coworker showed me the special Option-key shortcuts you can use on a Mac to make French accents, and then finally I settled on the nice and intuitive Compose Key support offered natively by Ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey

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On Linux/xorg I use the qwerty international layout and a dead compose key for the rarely used symbols.

Example: é is "altgr+e", ç is "altgr+", while Ω is "right-ctrl, shift+w" and ⁶ is "right-ctrl,^,6" etc.

You can do it all with the compose key. But for typing in french I find altgr+e to be faster than "rightctrl,',e".

The difference is if you don’t use these characters a lot, compose+accent, letter is a lot easier to remember than altgr+random key.

Especially when it’s not printed on your keyboard.

I was trying to make a grave accent, opposite direction to an acute, on Win10 - everything I tried seemed to make acute accents ... how do I, please?

Windows uses what they call "alt codes," where you hold down the alt key and type a numerical code on your numeric keypad. You can find them with a search: here's one site:

https://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/windows/codealt/

Note that you can't just do an accent and apply it to any character (like compose). You have to put in the code for the accented character.

Yes, I thought there had to be a grave accent method like altgr+e makes é, say altgr+ee makes è (it's easy on a touchscreen phone keyboard!).

nowadays the easiest way is to google the character by its name and add "unicode", then copy-paste, unless you do it a lot.

e.g. "a acute unicode" yields https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+00E1

That's not really easy...

Never said it’s easy ;) just the easiest…

Depending on your layout (I guess?) it's more easier to just type ´ (or any other dead key) and then the letter you want. éêè ...

Assuming US keyboard, you can use US International as a secondary layout. That would make typing “single quote” then the letter an acute accented letter.

So ‘ then a would become á

That's an acute, I want the accent the other way - and I know I could learn the alt-code but it's crazy if there isn't an easier way using the keyboard alone.

Why isn't it altgr+(letter) and repeated presses like holding down the letter on an Android mobile phone touch keyboard?

If you have a 105 key (EU, tall return) layout, consider changing to a layout with the ` as dead key. For example, the Irish layout is pretty much just the UK layout with dead key functionality + euro sign. `e will then type è while AltGr+e will type é.

If you have a 104 key (US, wide return) keyboard layout, you can try the US international layout. In that case, shift-~ will get you ` and you can use the same compose rules as above.

For Ω and other rarely used symbols, I just type: <Ctrl>+<Shift>+U 2126 <Space>.

Works like a charm in pretty much any program and keyboard layout.

For the more common acute/grave/.. letters, I use

  setxkbmap -layout latin,<local layout> -variant ,qwerty -option grp:switch,grp:alt_shift_toggle

Then I can use the nice us keyboard without dead keys for programming and access the local layout by holding <AltGr> (right alt) for local characters (usually via localized dead keys).

I also use dual layouts and found that switching between US (for coding) and US international (typing with diacritics) is the most comfortable setup for me. Both in Win and Mac switching between both modes is just pressing Ctrl+Space and the US international layout allows me to type all diacritics I use (Catalan) with an US keyboard.

Maybe I’m just stating the obvious and everybody already knows and is moving aware from that, so I won’t explain the details. But if someone is interested just let me know

Basically the same here, now I settled on QWERTY with a few tricks to do french diacritic signs. Compose key can be a bit slow at times, so I only use it for the less common characters, like e-circumflex. For the really common ones like e-acute and e-grave I simply assign additional shortcuts: for example hyper+e = e-acute (my keyboard has got additional modifier keys: it's not just ctrl/alt/shift as I've got additional physical keys, which I configured to act as Hyper and Super).

I'm using a logical FR layout on a physical Mac FR layout, the underlying layout for Japanese input is QWERTY while the pinyin for Traditional Chinese uses AZERTY... I'm tired of all these context switches and I wish there was an universal keyboard IME that allow me to type the languages I care about without having to switch between IME all the time. Same complains about mobile (iOS). I might build something one day because of how annoying it is (at least typing English is easy from FR keyboard so that's one less keyboard to use).

Can’t you just configure Japanese IME to use the same one as physical keyboard map? Japanese IME shouldn’t be adamant about “keymap goes with language” model.

Same issue.

I struggeled with french on German keyboard, so I searched how to type everything, and all wad easy except the ç.

The only solution was to type ALT+135 from the keypad. It worked until a recent windows update, now I get garbage from that shortcut.

I will give this a try, thanks!

I had a similar problem recently, but it was self-inflicted.

Try changing the status of the "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support" checkbox.

You can see this option by going to Settings and then: All Settings -> Time & Language -> Language -> "Administrative Language Settings"

> dual French/US keyboard layout (one for writing, the other for coding)

Why not use one of the QWERTY layouts with accented characters?

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