Accented characters using a US keyboard layout on OpenBSD
139 words, 1 minutes
My refurbished ThinkPad T460s shipped with an International US layout keyboard. And with the default Xenocara configuration, I couldn’t type accents. As I write 90% of my real-life emails in French, this was an issue.
Well… until I read the OpenBSD manpages for setxkbmap(1) and xkeyboard-config(7). Then I added the following line to my ~/.xsession file:
setxkbmap -model pc105 -layout us -variant altgr-intl -option compose:rctrl
And I can now use the right Ctrl key as Compose and issue accented characters using the so called “dead-keys”.
Ctrl ' [aAeiou] = áÁéíóú
Ctrl ` [aAeiou] = àÀèìòù
Ctrl " [aAeiou] = äÄëïöü
Ctrl ^ [aAeiou] = âÂêîôû
Ctrl - [aAeiou] = āĀēīōū
Ctrl ~ [aAeioun] = ãÃẽĩõũñ
Ctrl , [cC] = çÇ
Note that Alt Gr can also be used by default. But the key positions are quite complicated to remember.