No, I don’t believe there is a usable way to achieve this using “dead keys”. The other answer mentions the compose key. Well the compose key and dead keys function the exact same way, only using different mappings. Dead keys are essentially special-purpose compose keys.
The “dead key” concept is taken from typewriters where you can type for example `
without advancing the carriage, then type a
over it and thus get à
. The initial keypress is “dead” since the carriage stays in place.
Using letters (like a
) as dead keys
There is nothing special about keysyms like Multi_key
(the compose key), dead_greek
, dead_circumflex
, etc. You can use any keysym in your ~/.XCompose
file. Thus using normal letters works perfectly fine:
<a> <grave> : "à"
<a> <acute> : "á"
The problem is that now you cannot just write a
using one keystroke. You have to introduce mappings to effectively escape the “dead key”/mapping key functionality:
<a> <a> : "a"
<a> <space> : "a"
I can’t imagine that anyone would consider this a practical solution. Hence why I don’t think you can achieve what you want using compose key-style mappings.
Using combining diacritical marks
There is a way to type a
+ `
→ à
. You don’t even need compose key mappings. All you need to do is replace the dead keys with combining diacritical marks. These are Unicode glyphs that are meant to be combined with other glyphs. So if you want to type à
using this method:
a + ◌̀ → à (†1)
Some commonly used combining variants of diacritical marks:
- ◌̀ U+0300 Combining Grave Accent
- ◌́ U+0301 Combining Acute Accent
- ◌̂ U+0302 Combining Circumflex Accent
- ◌̃ U+0303 Combining Tilde
- ◌̄ U+0304 Combining Macron
† 1: The ◌
(U+25CC DOTTED CIRCLE) is used to quote the combining diacritic mark.
a
without accent? Do you really want the typing ofthey're
to producetheỳre
? Or do you want to limit it to only a few base letters? – Stéphane Chazelas Apr 23 '18 at 14:30a
is typically already delivered to the application after it has been typed. – Johan Myréen Apr 23 '18 at 14:31Backspace
key pressed,Backspace
key released,à
key pressed,à
key released sequence of events when one presses'
while the last key event was for aa
key. – Stéphane Chazelas Apr 23 '18 at 14:35