ok. i think i am a little closer to a solution. only very little though. i took a few hours to read man pages this after noon, esp. about keymaps etc.
i checked my jp106 default and i found all the accentuated caracters included in it as compose definitions. besides the fact that i am not exactly excited at the way the caracters are 'composed' i still did not find any way to activate the composition. i trully appreciated your answers but found out that i am not exactly willing to shift my system to emacs just to have accented caracters. i work with mutt/vi kon/mutt-ja/jvim and changing everything to emacs would be very time costly in terms of learning time. thank you for your understanding. jc helary
