Compose Key

Having a compose key is sick. Why have I only just found out about this.

I us the US keyboard layout, so doing accents has been a pain. Either you memorise a bunch of unintuitive strings of characters, or you copy+paste.

Compose key to the rescue! I use setxkbmap -option compose:ralt to make the right alt key the compose key, and now I can enter accents and other useful unicode characters with very sensible key sequences.

You can add sequences with the file ~/.XCompose, or by using the environment variable $XCOMPOSEFILE to put it somewhere else (also might wanna set $XCOMPOSECACHE).

Like lots of keyboard meta keys it has a Unicode character you rarely see: ⎄

Sequences

Some one's I've found useful

Press [compose key], then the indicated sequence of keys

※ Something in this table means I can't edit this page through the web interface.

Character Sequence
◌́ ' [letter]
◌̀ ` [letter]
◌̂ ^ [letter]
◌̌ v [letter]
◌̆ u [letter]
◌̃ ~ [letter]
◌̈ “ [letter]
◌̊ o [letter]
ç , c
ø / o
æ a e
œ o e
f f
f i
f l
ß s s
ij i j
< '
> '
< ”
> “
« < <
» > >
÷ : -
° o o
× x x
½ 1 2
8 8
^ |
- >
v |
< -
# q
# e
# E
# S
# #
# b
# f
- - -
- - .
. .
. =
§ s o
! p
© o c
® o r
t m
< 3
< >
: )
: (
N O or N o

See Also