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.

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.

• Compose key
  • Compose_key#Common_compose_combinations