I’m happy! I’m happy because I just found out how to get a Compose key on my shiny MacBook. I want you to be happy too, so I’ll show you how you can get one, too. I’ll even show you how to do it on Windows and Ubuntu. But first, I will explain why this makes me so happy. (If you don’t care about the why, just click here and go straight to the how. But you’ll miss a perfectly good geek-out.)

Why?

I’m a language geek. I like to spell words correctly. Words such as naïveté. Actually, I’m also Dutch, so I have to deal with words like coëfficiënt and of course hé and hè (which, really, are two very distinct words). I speak French (or should I say: français) and I live in a country where we pay with €. And if that’s not enough, I like to spell people’s names correctly. I’m a software engineer; we’re a pretty international bunch. I’ve worked with people called René, Radovanović, and even Enikő. Yes, that’s an o with a double accent aigu. It’s Hungarian. Try finding that key on your keyboard.

I want it to be easy to type these special characters. I also want it to not get in the way.

Windows has this nifty trick. If you use the US International keyboard layout, you can press a " followed by an e and you automatically get an ë. Sounds nice in theory, but for me, it gets in the way. I’m a programmer; I need to be able to type things like String vowel = "e";. And when I do, I don’t want that to show up like String vowel = ë";. That’s just annoying. On a day to day basis, I have to type "e much more often than I have to type ë.

Of course, if I type a space after I type ", I get my precious ", and I can then type an e and it won’t turn into an ë anymore. I know people, programmers like me even, who have this extra key stroke ingrained in their muscle memory. If they work on a computer where this option is disabled, they type things like String vowel = " e";. Notice the extra space? Now I have nothing against these people, but this is just plain stupid. It’s like hitting your face every five minutes hoping to catch a fly.

OS X has something slightly smarter. To get a special character, you press a special key combination. For example, to get an é, you press ⌥E, followed by e. If you want an ë, you press ⌥U, followed by e. The problem with those ⌥ combinations is that they’re pretty arbitrary: e for ´, u for ¨, and i for ˆ. In fact, I can never remember what key corresponds to what symbol. It’s not easy.

Also, both methods only support a very limited set of special symbols. Enikő is out of luck; she has to hunt through the Character Map program to spell her name on a non-Hungarian keyboard. If you think that’s too exotic, then you should realise that € isn’t directly supported on many systems, either.

I’m not even going to mention Alt codes.

Surprisingly, Linux, for all its usability-issues, has an easy and elegant solution to this mess: the Compose key. You pick a key you don’t use often (I like the Menu key: nobody uses that button anyway) which becomes the Compose key. If you want to enter a special symbol, you hit this button, followed by the two (or more) symbols that you want to ‘compose’. For example, Compose followed by " followed by e becomes ë. Compose followed by = followed by o becomes ő, and Compose followed by = followed by e becomes €. Easy!

And it goes even further than that. Combine - and >, and you get an arrow: →, T and M become ™, < and 3 become ♥, and, I was surprised to find out while researching this article, Compose-C-C-C-P becomes ☭. Seriously.

I like this. It doesn’t get in the way at all. I’m free to type String vowel = "e"; without any ë’s showing up. Also, it’s super easy. In fact, it’s so easy that sometimes when I’m bored, I amuse myself by trying out various combinations of keys to see what comes out. How would you type Æ, ¿ or ©?

By now, I have probably convinced you that you want to have a Compose key, too. So how do you get one? It’s easy.

How?

• OS X: Install the US custom keyboard layout: download and installation instructions are here.
  Note that MacBooks don’t have a Menu key. This tool uses the § key instead, which is fine, because who uses it anyway? And even if you do, it’s a Compose-s-o away.
  See my follow-up post, An even better way of typing.
• Windows: Install this nifty little program.
• Ubuntu: Go to System Settings → Keyboard Layout → Options → Compose key position.
• Any other Linux? Then you probably already know how to do this.

Enjoy a better way of typing! ☺