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Comment by mavhc | Hacker News Reader

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-use-the-uni...

"Creating international characters

When you press the APOSTROPHE ( ' ) key, QUOTATION MARK ( " ) key, ACCENT GRAVE ( ` ) key, TILDE ( ~ ) key, or ACCENT CIRCUMFLEX,. also called the CARET key, ( ^ ) key, nothing is displayed on the screen until you press a second key:"...

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The constant downside to that is that you can no longer type these characters without considering what the next character is going to be, and pressing space if you want to opt out of the combination. If you type the accented characters much more often than the quotes it can be fine, but it gets annoying very quickly while programming.

The compose key is basically an opt-in alternative to combining those characters that also allows a lot of other combinations.

If you are willing to create your own layout or use a third-party layout, you could forgo dead keys and instead put all your symbols on the "AltGr" layer (which I think basically works the same as the "Compose" key).

The approach I took for my keyboard layout [0] was a compromise: I kept the base layout the same as US, but added a bunch of dead keys on the AltGr layer. So e.g. ⟨ď⟩ is ‘G-% d’; ⟨ɐ⟩ is ‘G-f a’.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

It is weird it's not altgr-' and altgr-^ that activate accents.

That's what I use on Linux, in addition to direct Alt+Character for the variants I need most commonly and XCompose whatever is left.

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