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Parentheses are inserted by pressing two keys simultaneously. Diacritics on layouts that use dead keys are inserted by pressing two keys in sequence. Or, often, two keys simultaneously and then a third key in sequence (E.g. Shift-6 then Space for ^)

I'm Portuguese but live in the UK. The Portuguese layout (especially on macs) is dreadful for programming (because a bunch of important characters like brackets require Alt Gr to type), the UK layout sucks for writing Portuguese (because of the diacritics), so I ended up having to get used to US International as the compromise layout. I've gotten kind of used to it over the years, but the exact behaviour for dead keys varies a fair bit by platform, and especially on Linux can get quite aggravating.

I think on Linux, I took one of the key I never use (insert) and put it as the compose key. That resolved most of my issues with writing French.

FWIW --- programmer dvorak lets you type () without "shift" but both ~ and ^ require shift. https://www.kaufmann.no/roland/dvorak/

highly recommend every programmer set up hold/tap for their modifiers, including space cadet style parentheses.

LISP in shambles