How to add the acute accent to the letter 'e' - as in José's name :-)

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If you’ve ever wondered whether there was an easy way to add an acute to the letter e as in José’s name - there is - at least on a Mac :lol:

Hold down alt and the letter e - then tap e again :003:

That’s it :023:

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There’s another way :lol:

Just hold down the letter e and then when the options show, hit the number 2

Same for the š in Saša’s name - hold down s and hit 3 :023:

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With windows and Linux I have configured my keyboard to simply hit the tick-key and then the e.

I have modifier keys for about all important accents, but except for accents, I do not use them very often…

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Nice - do you also know what the ‘standard’ way is Norbert?

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On Linux this is called the compose key.

I have mine mapped to right alt. So I would use right alt + e +' to get é

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No, as it massively depends on your keyboard mapping and your operating system dictates what kind of mappings are available per default or possible at all. Also your systems language massively affects what is available.

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I don’t have a compose key setup (I use a coding variant of dvorak and I want all my keys accessible for programming), so I just copy/paste… ^.^;

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I rather see this as a limitation. In my setup I have composable accents or others twice (or compose them with spaces) to have them appear as a single character eg. for code in markdown.

Also I tried to learn neo 2, but as I’m switching computers far to often, so I stuck with German qwertz

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Yeah I use my ` button so much that I’d be driven crazy if it added things to characters instead of acted as it’s own character on a single press… ^.^;

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In Windows you can hold Alt then enter ASCII code with numpad. For é it’s 233.
Linux has something similar: Ctrl+Shift+U, then enter ASCII code in hex, é is e9, then Enter.

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11

This. The compose key is imo the best option. Fun fact, I I mapped it precisely for the reason of this thread to be able to type José correctly :slight_smile:

Configuring it is very easy - Keyboard settings --> Options --> Position of compose key. I also have it on right alt. It’s intuitive so that for the Germans on an English layout you can also get in the occasional ü by doing compose + " + u etc. You can even fake the occasional Swedish ȧ (. + a although I think it’s not fully right)

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Just a little context: I have no idea what José’s keyboard settings look like, but if you’re writing Portuguese, which has 4 accents (5 for Brazilian Portuguese) which can fall on 5 vowels, your input method is configured so that the accent keys are modifiers be default. To write á, you simply press ‘ + a (no compose key needed).

The bad part of this is that using these accents while programming is harder. In my setup (with a a Portuguese keyboard), for example, to write the sigil ~A I have to press the tilde key twice, which males two tildes appear, then delete the second tilde and insert the A.

This gets old quite fast, but writing in Portuguese without these modifiers keys is quite hard… For example: “Ó João, o Zé vai freqüentemente pôr a roupa a lavar àquela lavandaria” Those are 5 accents in a sentence xD

The Brazilian keyboard layout (which sadly Portugal hasn’t adopted) has much more accessible keys for characters commonly used in programming.

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Sounds like windows :wink: I have that “problem” there as well. On Linux I do have to hit them twice, but the accent is then inserted only once.

Muscles get used to hitting the key twice quite fast. I do not even realize it anymore :wink: It is quite hard though sitting at a windows PC where I often have to delete the doubly inserted accent…

You are free to change your layout to whatever you like. I have not yet discovered a system where the keyboard layout was not changeable per user…

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I’m too used to my layout for that. And even if I weren’t, the Brazilian keyboard layout is physically different and contains one extra key. I’ve tried to create a sensible map without that extra key but I couldn’t make it work…

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I have been using the US International with Dead Keys layout for a very long time.

Its main functionality is that keys like ', " and ~ only show up on its own when you enter a space after pressing them, but to create accents you thus type 'e and it becomes é. ("e becomes ë, ~e becomes ẽ etc.), which is a really easy way to remember how to do all the weird accents.

And then the rest of the non-ASCII common characters like ç, æ and ß are type-able by using the Alt Gr (right Alt) key.

That said, I do want to switch over to Dvorak at some point :grin:.

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16

Also for team compose team, a friend recently taught me how to find out what the right compose is for even the less obvious special characters. So if I wanna know how to type ł to correctly type Michał I can just do:

tobi@speedy:~$ grep ł /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
<dead_stroke> <l>               	: "ł"   U0142 # LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE
<Multi_key> <slash> <l>          	: "ł"   U0142 # LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE
<Multi_key> <l> <slash> 		: "ł"   U0142 # LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE
<Multi_key> <KP_Divide> <l>      	: "ł"   U0142 # LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE

Works with “all the things” - also the Swedish å so I can finally type Swedish without copy & paste:

tobi@speedy:~$ grep å /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
<dead_abovering> <a>             	: "å"   aring # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
<Multi_key> <o> <a>              	: "å"   aring # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
<Multi_key> <asterisk> <a> 		: "å"   aring # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
<Multi_key> <a> <asterisk> 		: "å"   aring # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
<Multi_key> <a> <a> 			: "å"   aring # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
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