Ruth Schäfer

Sr. Research Software Engineer at Saga, Ph.D. in Particle Physics

What to do about umlauts?

I was recently trying out Wayland, which broke my previous solution of how to type umlauts and other characters I need regularly, Autokey. Luckily, there’s an even more convenient solution:

  • In your Keyboard settings, enable a Compose Key, e.g. Right Alt or Right Ctrl
  • Install ibus (sudo dnf install ibus)
  • Place the shortcuts for non-standard characters at ~/.XCompose
  • When you’ve finished or updated your .XCompose, run ibus restart

And that’s how I get to type my name, Schäfer, properly while maintaining the American keyboard layout with its convenient programming symbols.

My .XCompose is attached, but here’s an exerpt:

<Multi_key> <a> : "ä"
<Multi_key> <a> <o> : "å"
<Multi_key> <n> : "ñ"
<Multi_key> <o> : "ö"
<Multi_key> <o> </> : "ø"
<Multi_key> <s> : "ß"
<Multi_key> <u> : "ü"
<Multi_key> <1> : "°"
<Multi_key> <4> : "€"

In addition to umlauts and other localizations, this can also be useful for Greek letters (say, for α-particles or γ-rays), arrows (⇒ less words to write), non-standard punctuation (¿, ¡, ‽), comparison symbols (≈, ≤, ≠), and assorted other fun symbols (⌬, ♣, ⚛, ⛵︎, ❂) and on-the-fly maths (∀, ∈, ∫, ∂).

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