I typed these easily: í â © ™ å č ə ff ĸ ° ™ ß ŭ × ⓞ ¡

February 21, 2025 11:14 AM

A secret move some Linux and Unix users know is that typing special characters needn't be a chore involving Alt codes or a character map application. You go into keyboard settings (on KDE go under Keyboard then Key Bindings; on Gnome you'll have to install Tweaks) and pick a key to be the compose key (I suggest Caps Lock). Then press it, then a symbol (like apostrophe), then a character to combine it with (like e), and what you end up with is the characters combined if possible: é. Or... (see inside) On macOS, enabling the Compose key is hard (try this). On Windows, you can install WinCompose. Jason Lefkowitz wrote a great introduction to the Compose key in 2015. This old page hosted in Dartmouth's webspace gives a number of sequences to try.

Or a heart, Compose, <, 3: ♥
Or a smile, Compose, :, ): ☺
Or a trademark symbol, Compose, t, m: ™
Or a copyright symbol, Compose, o, c: ©
Or a Euro symbol, Compose, =, c: €
Or an upside-down exclamation point, Compose, !, !: ¡
Or a hammer-and-sickle, Compose, (capitals) C, C, C, P: ☭
A number of symbols can be gotten just by pressing Compose then a key twice: o: ° - a: å - s: ß
f in particular makes a joined-f ligature, Compose, f, f: ff. Compose, f, i makes a fi ligature.

There, that should be enough to get you started on your compository journey! The best thing about the compose key is that its sequences are generally intuitive and so easy to remember, but it's also fun to explore for yourself and find out what symbols you can discover.

posted by JHarris (36 comments total)

As I grow more pedantic with age, I increasingly use the em-dash, so this is my huckleberry.
posted by Lemkin at 11:19 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Em-dash, Compose, -, -, -: —
posted by JHarris at 11:24 AM on February 21 [2 favorites]

On macOS, ‘Option’+‘-’ gives the en-dash ‘–’, and ‘Option’+‘Shift’+‘-’ gives the em-dash ‘—’.
posted by It is regrettable that at 11:36 AM on February 21 [5 favorites]

Windows users in the U.S. can enable the US International Keyboard, which uses the right-side ALT key (sometimes refered to as AltGr) as a compose-like key. Like a lot of things with Windows, it's mixed:

• It makes it much easier to type Spanish characters: each of the accented vowels and ñ become AltGr + the letter, and likewise ¡ is AltGr-1 and ¿ is AltGr-/
• However, by default it turns apostrophes, double quotes and tildes into dead keys. So if you type something like "All dogs go to heaven" you would wind up with Äll dogs go to heaven" instead.

For a while I just toggled between the international keyboard and the regular US one—it can be set up to switch by pressing left-ALT-Shift—whenever I wanted to toggle between writing Spanish and writing code or dialog in English. But it was kind of a pain. So one slow afternoon a year ago I figured out I could download the MS Keyboard Layout Creator (which has not been significantly updated since the Win98 days). I removed the deadkey function from apostrophe and double-quote (since that's where I would get annoyed when writing code), and added in shortcuts for bullets, en dashes and em dashes based on the Mac short cuts (AltGr+Shift+8 for bullets, e.g.).

Turns out Windows 10 support for custom layouts was extremely busted. I had to generate a DLL for the layout, then install it—and even then, I had to go into the registry and change the existing International Keyboard to point to my new DLL instead of the old one.

When I updated to Windows 11 and I had to reinstall the DLL again, the process was a lot easier—the setup installer actually installs the new layout so you can select it, without registry editing. But I did take the time to restore the deadkey when I use AltGr (e.g., AltGr+', then a will return á) and add a few other shortcuts (like putting the degree symbol on AltGr+0 = °). A giant pain in the ßutt, but Ï þòught últimætlÿ it was wørth the çhållenge.
posted by thecaddy at 11:44 AM on February 21 [5 favorites]

(PS Yes I know that ß is a double ss)
posted by thecaddy at 11:47 AM on February 21 [1 favorite]

On a Mac you can get all those accents super easily - just hold down a key and a little menu will pop up above it, with every accented variant available, and numbers below.

e1:è e2:é e3:ë e5:ě e6:ẽ e7:ē e8:ė e9:ę

You can also turn on "smart quotes and dashes" to have -- turn into an en-dash and ---- into an em-dash. Though some programs and websites break this one. Usually they are also ones that break the spellcheck but the MeFi comment box just breaks those, oddly enough. alt-- and alt-shift-- will do those, too: – —

You can also do a lot of combining accents: alt-n gets you a ~, and if you hit a key that will take that accent, such as o, you'll get that: õ. If it's not compatible then you just get ˜z or whatever. Or you can hit space to just have the accent: ˆ˜´¨

You can also hit command-control-space to bring up the Character Viewer, where you can search for any character, though you'll have to take your hands off the keyboard as it doesn't grab focus from the current text box. There's a search box: ❤️😊™©€¡☭. You can also hit the ... menu to at the top and choose "customize list" to add a lot of different collections of characters. Do you need to enter the occasional Ogham, Manichean, or Phoenician character? Sutton Signwriting? Duployan? It's all in there along with collections like "dingbats" and "technical symbols" and "box drawing".
posted by egypturnash at 11:55 AM on February 21 [12 favorites]

I wrangle three languages on one keyboard via Budgie / Cinnamon on Manjaro. For the most part I'm pretty happy with the setup. The first two aren't too far apart (English and Spanish) and the Spanish diacriticals can be handled with the right Alt key via the US-English international keyboard.

However, the third language (Arabic) requires an entirely different virtual keyboard. Yes, I have little white stickies on each of my keyboard buttons and I don't have the layout memorized yet, but fortunately all it takes is left-Alt + Shift to activate.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 12:05 PM on February 21

macOS makes many special characters really easy, just by holding down option. If you forget that [option]-[shift]-[8] gives you the degrees symbol (°) or that [option]-[j] throws in a ∆, you can always enable the Keyboard Viewer to see visually what you can type without needing to revert to the "insert symbol" menu.

Having a dedicated key for that "insert symbol" menu (the globe key, on my current Mac) is great. Miss it on Windows? Try [Windows]+[.] - this key combo pops up the emoji menu by default, but there are tabs for other symbols as well.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:28 PM on February 21 [4 favorites]

Definitely saner than memorizing a numerical table and using alt-0233 on windows to get é, but I really love the android hold down the input key method where you just hold down e and get all the possible accents of e. Holding down a keyboard key to get repeated characters always seemed like aweird and borderline useless option. Like how many times in my life do I want to type out an arbitrary number of eeees?
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:37 PM on February 21

BrotherCaine, are you saying that you're not living a life of eeees?
posted by It is regrettable that at 12:41 PM on February 21 [9 favorites]

For more macOS goodness, you can put a link to the keyboard viewer in the menu bar [a search for "viewer" in System Settings will get you to the toggle switch] which will let you open a window highlighting your currently pressed keys and showing live updates as you press them. Pressing 'option' will give you a map of where all the diacritics and alternate characters you may want are located.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 12:58 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Though I'm not the target audience - I make do for the most part by having memorized just 3 Alt codes (è, é, and °) on PC plus the Android method mentioned by BrotherCaine - I think this is pretty neat.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:05 PM on February 21

→ On a Mac you can get all those accents super easily

You can now, but that feature only appeared in the last few years. You used to have to learn the old Mac shortcuts like Keycaps used to show you. Compose has been working on Unix machines for decades. I started working at a multilingual editorial shop that used Suns in 1997, and they quietly handled these features even then. This rpe-dates everyone using Unicode, too. I don't miss the utter bear that was working on a text that was in both Italian and Greek with only 8-bit character sets.

The Mac emoji input doesn't paste into every app. A few of the more console-like ones I use aren't even seen as a paste target for multilingual input.

I find myself using Compose mostly for quotation marks and ellipses (“…”). Proper dashes are nice (—, –) as are non break spaces (Compose Space Space). Fractions are Compose Number Number: ½⅔¾⅘⅚⅞ (no sevenths, but that's Unicode for you) µ×÷£ are good too.
posted by scruss at 2:09 PM on February 21 [2 favorites]

On MacOS, if you hold down a key that can take an accent for slightly longer than usual, a pop-up appears and allows you to choose the one you want (using either the corresponding number or a mouse-click, as you wish).
posted by senor biggles at 2:42 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Nthing that entering special characters is quite easy on macOS.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:02 PM on February 21

Hm, I have used Ubuntu for the past couple decades on all my desktops and laptops, and I always had the compose key bound to the right Alt key (AltGr on a UK keyboard). I used to chuckle at the CCCP sequence, but it no longer works for me. Instead that produces "ℂCP".

The combination to make the ☭ is now \?, which makes more visual sense.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:32 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

Also, suggesting the CapsLock for anything other than your primary Ctrl key is sacrilege. Model F layout forever!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:34 PM on February 21

I am not sure it's as easy as using the Compose key, to enter special characters on macOS, especially with this breadth of characters. But if it works well enough for you that's fine. I just get tired of one company's specific proprietary solution that gets people's muscle memories trained to their profit, especially since it seems there IS Compose key support on macOS, it just requires jumping through hoops to enable.

I tested the CCCP glyph before posting and it works for me. Backslash-? doesn't work on my system. Maybe it's an old definition file?
posted by JHarris at 4:10 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

I'm on Wayland rather than X, so different keyboard input systems kick in there.

I used to re-bind *8 to produce ☃ back in the day.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:31 PM on February 21

On Mac or iPad, you just hold down the letter and then you can pick from all the available options. I am surprised no one has mentioned this!
posted by snofoam at 4:47 PM on February 21

If you know Japanese (or are willing to learn!), your Input Method Editor (the software that lets you write Japanese with a QWERTY keyboard) gets you, like, 60% of the way there. For instance:

• kopi-raito → ©
• shuwa → ə
• ha-to → ♥
• gouji → ß ("合字" is "ligature")
• suugaku → × (数学 is "mathematics")
• kaomoji → ＼(^o^)／ (顔文字 is "face glyph")
• yajirusi → → (矢印 is "arrow")

All you need to do is select the result you want from a little list that pops up.
I'm using Mozc (pronounced "mozuku"), but YMMV if you use a different IME engine.
posted by The genius who rejected Anno's budget proposal. at 5:36 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

The complaint about it being hard on macOS seems like complaining like complaining that it’s hard to write Chinese using English characters since neither convention was ordained by God, they’re just something which people got used to. Both the Unix compose key and Mac input system are pretty old as far as computing goes: Sun released the first Unix workstation with a Compose key in 1987 and Apple had their system at least as far back as 1989 (e.g. here’s a book from 1990 describing shortcuts which work the same way today). Given how prevalent Macs were for professional document creation and publishing the number of users had more zeroes on the end, so it’s not surprising that the compose key, which fewer people learned, didn’t get much traction in the face of a more intuitive system built-in to the platform.

What’s weird to me is that Windows took so much longer and there are still today people holding down the Alt key and entering numbers because they learned that before the Mac-like system became a system feature instead of a Word feature.
posted by adamsc at 5:43 PM on February 21 [5 favorites]

I've always bound it to the (otherwise useless) windows key - I like command . . for ellipsis
posted by mbo at 6:21 PM on February 21 [1 favorite]

obviously the important thing to do on macOS is to open the character viewer and type “combining” in the search bar and just get weird with it
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:12 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

I'm not a fan of the compose key because in my language, I use a specific set of characters/accents a lot, and so that needs to be easy; the method I find easiest is to use a keyboard layout with dead keys. I type the accent, then the letter, and they are added up for me with no extra key strokes.

I've tried the compose key method for a year or so but it never grew on me. When I went back to dead keys it felt like coming home.
posted by Too-Ticky at 2:58 AM on February 22 [2 favorites]

as oft pointed out on social media, everyone knows that the canonical way to type é on Linux is to visit the Wikipedia article for Beyoncé and copy and paste.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 3:58 AM on February 22 [6 favorites]

Huh, Too-Ticky and others who use "dead keys." I wasn't sure what you meant at first. If I'm understanding you correctly, instead of a keyboard where you press a key to enter a mode to indicate that you need to enter a special mark, essentially it's always in that mode, and the accent key does nothing without another keypress?

Holding a key (either a physical or virtual one) to bring up character variants is a good solution for occasional use. I use that on Android at times.

Chef Flamboyardee, before discovering the Compose key, I'd frequently Google a name for the character and copy it out of the search results. I'd do that on Windows too, it's quicker than Googling up the Alt code or opening Charmap. That's also how I learned, to paste text without formatting, many programs allow Ctrl-Shift-V.
posted by JHarris at 4:03 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

JHarris: If I'm understanding you correctly, instead of a keyboard where you press a key to enter a mode to indicate that you need to enter a special mark, essentially it's always in that mode, and the accent key does nothing without another keypress?

Yeah, I believe that's correct. And if I just want to type the accent, like " ' ~ ^
... I type it and follow up with a space.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:11 AM on February 22

Being in the UK and working with a lot of Europeans, I have found this very useful: https://zolid.com/uk-intl-kb/index.htm
posted by merlynkline at 5:28 AM on February 22

accents schmaccents, what about the planets?
☿ ♀ ♁ ♂ ♃ ♄ ⛢ ♆ ☾ ☉ [✓]
I 'just' ctlC ctlV a plaintext file [without paying 0.2 grams of CO₂ gootax] on my desktop, but I much prefer keyboard shortcuts, so thanks evəryone.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:35 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

When I need a character that I didn't memorise the Alt code for in the 1990s, I click on the icon in my Windows taskbar to bring up the Touch Keyboard, which functions the same way a phone's on-screen keyboard does: click and hold on a letter to bring up all the accented characters associated with it. I'm pretty sure this takes slightly less time than hitting the Compose key and then staring into space trying to remember what two-character combination will give me a ×.
posted by Hogshead at 9:52 AM on February 22 [2 favorites]

Whoa, Hogshead. Great trick. I've immediately added the Virtual Keyboard to my panel, which does the exact same thing but in Linux Mint.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:44 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

It used to drive me insane how difficult it was to type ¢
posted by TWinbrook8 at 2:32 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

I'm firmly in the  (option + shift + k) camp and benefit tremendously from iCloud synching my text replacements between all my devices.

‰! + zoom (pronounced "bang ZOOM") ➛ my individual Zoom link
‰! + shrug ➛ drops in the all time great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
‰! + tab ➛ (whitespace tab)
‰etc. Guess what --> is ?

On those occasions I find myself behind enemy lines, I find the Glyphboard website a relief. "It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell." Life is more civilized when ± ™ ¢ ½ ❌ ✅ ‽ and (ভ_ ভ) ރ ／/ ┊ \＼ are only a few easy strokes away.
posted by now i'm piste at 6:08 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

one thing I like to do as someone who has a typography-centric brain sickness is to use TextExpander snippets (or just the macOS/iOS system-level text substitutions) to have ready access to semi-regularly-typed glyphs. For instance, I have all the Unicode fractions set up with snippets like ;3/4 to type "¾," or ;'2 to type "²" and stuff like that. Also useful for phrases you have to write frequently for work purposes and/or have trouble remembering sometimes! For instance, in my line of work (Japanese-English translation) I frequently have to insert explanatory parentheticals for the durations of historic periods and eras, so instead of committing the start and end dates of the Edo period to memory, I type ;edo and it immediately blurps in "(1603–1868)" for me. Oh, and this is useful for email addresses too! I use d@@ to fill in my email address (basically think "first letter of email address, then @@") and have another similar one for my other email address.

You can do some pretty neat stuff with computers nowadays!
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:51 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

Since we're talking about expandability now, the Compose key can also accept per-user created lists of additional characters, and there's a GitHub repository that offers a lot of new combinations.
posted by JHarris at 10:34 AM on February 23 [1 favorite]