I use QWERTY keyboards with a US layout. Sometimes I need to type accents or cedillas, and I keep forgetting how to do so, this post summarizes how to do it.
Intro
There are basically two layouts:
- US (‘vanilla’): type accents like
'^`~
and they will be emitted immediately - US International (INTL): accents are the so called ‘dead keys’:
A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a mechanical typewriter, or computer keyboard, that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter.
We can switch between keyboard layouts with setxkbmap
. It’s also possible to
use localectl
in systemd-based distros, but its syntax is harder to remember
so I won’t even include it here.
Set US ‘vanilla’ keyboard layout
$ setxkbmap us
This is what a standard QWERTY keyboard should use to type in English.
Set US International (INTL) keyboard layout
$ setxkbmap -layout us -variant intl
This is what a standard QWERTY keyboard1 should use to type, for example, in Portuguese or in German.
Portuguese
- á é í ó ú : ' + <vowel>
- â ê î ô û : ^ + <vowel>
- ã õ : ~ + <vowel>
- à : ` + <vowel>
- ç (cedilla) : Alt Gr + , (Option + c on macOS)
German
- ß (ss) : Alt Gr + s (Option + s on macOS)
- ä ö ü : " + <vowel>
Alt Gr is typically the Right Alt key. ↩︎