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: ⎄
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 |
| ff | f f |
| fi | f i |
| fl | 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 |