On 2009-02-17, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: > There is a "US-International" layout that makes the right-alt > behave like Alt Gr, and allowing easier entry for non-English > (mostly Spanish) characters. I don't know if US-International > keyboards actually exists or if it's just a virtual layout. > However, even then, it does not behave like the "Compose" key > as described by the Wikipedia article, which makes it sound > like a dead key.
A dead key and a compose key are related, but not quite the same thing. A dead key is one that when struck doesn't generate a "letter" but instead modifies the "letter" that's generated by the next keystroke. Unlike a modifier like shift/alt/control, a dead key or a compose key is struck and released and then the next key is struck. Some non-English keyboards have deadicated deadkeys for commonly used accents. Dead keys are more-or-less the equivalent of a typewriter key that imprints a glyph onto the paper but doesn't move the platen (or the type-ball, if you want to think like a selectric). What a compose key does is temporarily make the _next_ key struck act like a dead key. To enter รด, you strike compose, ^, o. Hitting compose makes the ^ key temporarily into a dead key. > It's just a modifier, like Shift. It doesn't indicate any > combining of following keystrokes. Maybe it does act like that > for other layouts. It's all news to me, as I've never used any > non-US keyboard. :) Me neither. I've set up right-ALT as my compose key. [How do you enter accented or non-latin characters without a compose key?] The problem is that it stopped working recently in aterm, and I can't figure out why. In aterm, if I hit compose ^ o, I just get "^o". In urxvt, compose sequences are ignored completely. Furthermore, both aterm and urxvt correctly _display_ non-ascii characters that were entered in other applications using compose sequences. You can even paste them into aterm and urxvt. You just can't enter them from the keyboard. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! over in west at Philadelphia a puppy is visi.com vomiting ...