How to enter german Umlaute and other special characters on US keyboards
Compose Key
The Compose Key is a configurable special key in the X11 keyboard input system. On our linux clients the Compose Key is configured on the Right Windows Key on the keyboard.
If you press and release the compose key you can now enter special combinations of existing characters on the keyboard to compose special characters. Here is a table of the most commonly used combinations:
key 1 |
key 2 |
result |
||
" |
a |
ä |
||
" |
A |
Ä |
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^ |
a |
â |
||
` |
e |
è |
||
' |
e |
é |
||
- |
: |
÷ |
||
1 |
2 |
½ |
||
= |
c |
€ |
||
- |
L |
£ |
||
o |
c |
© |
||
/ |
O |
Ø |
||
You can find a complete list at: http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose
Entering characters with the unicode code
After pressing <CTRL><SHIFT>u simultaneously you can enter characters with their unicode code (while stil holding <CTRL><SHIFT>), e.g. the code 2665 gives the character ♥, or fb21 gives the character ﬡ, ... enjoy it ... ☺
For a unicode table see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters
Switching keyboard layout
If you are able to use other keyboard layouts than US blindly you can also switch the keyboard to another layout ( swiss german, ...).
In all modern linux desktops environments (Gnome, KDE, Xfce, ..) the keyboard layout can be configured by the user in the Settings/Preferences menu.