That's a legacy behavior got from old typewriter machines in which the accents did not move the carriage as normal characters did, just printing the accent (that had to be high enough for upper case letters) and waiting for the accented letter to do the move.
As far as I know, in KDE you may install an international layout toggle, so different behaviors - and even quite different lay-outs - may co-exist. Francisco On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 9:06 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On Dienstag 17 Februar 2009, Grant Edwards wrote: >> On 2009-02-17, Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > There is a "US-International" layout that makes the right-alt >> > behave like Alt Gr, and allowing easier entry for non-English >> > (mostly Spanish) characters. I don't know if US-International >> > keyboards actually exists or if it's just a virtual layout. >> > However, even then, it does not behave like the "Compose" key >> > as described by the Wikipedia article, which makes it sound >> > like a dead key. >> >> A dead key and a compose key are related, but not quite the >> same thing. A dead key is one that when struck doesn't >> generate a "letter" but instead modifies the "letter" that's >> generated by the next keystroke. Unlike a modifier like >> shift/alt/control, a dead key or a compose key is struck and >> released and then the next key is struck. Some non-English >> keyboards have deadicated deadkeys for commonly used accents. >> Dead keys are more-or-less the equivalent of a typewriter key >> that imprints a glyph onto the paper but doesn't move the >> platen (or the type-ball, if you want to think like a >> selectric). >> >> What a compose key does is temporarily make the _next_ key >> struck act like a dead key. >> >> To enter รด, you strike compose, ^, o. Hitting compose makes >> the ^ key temporarily into a dead key. > > nope, just ^ and o no other key. > > at least in kde. > > -- "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have one idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." - George Bernard Shaw
