this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Non-English Keyboard Input on KDE (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Has anyone successfully typed either European accented characters or Japanese Kanas on their physical keyboard?

For the longest time, I've been trying to get non-English characters to appear on my system. Specifically European accented characters. I've read about the compose key, but I could never make it work somehow.

I've also tried to make the Kanas to appear using the Japanese keyboard, but that too doesn't work.

I'm using mostly KDE system, on many different distros. As for the keyboard, it's almost always standard US QWERTY without the numpad, varying between various laptops (mostly Thinkpads) and USB keyboards. For the Japanese, it's a Thinkpad W530 (should also apply to X230, T430, and T530).

I've been using Linux for quite a while now. I'm familiar with most inner working of the system, but this the one thing I can never wrap my head around!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Has anyone successfully typed either European accented characters or Japanese Kanas on their physical keyboard?

For the Latin extended characters, I've used AltGr, Compose, probably at some point the GTK control-shift-u thing. I've also used various emacs text input methods to do so. I don't speak Japanese.

I don't use KDE, but it looks like you can set it up to bind Compose at a per-user level once you've logged into your account.

https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/ComposeKey

EDIT: "Motörhead"

that was typed using the Compose key, which on this laptop I have replacing the Right Alt key. On this system, which is Debian, I do it systemwide by editing /etc/default/keyboard, and adding:

XKBOPTIONS="compose:ralt,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,ctrl:swapcaps"

That swaps Left Control and Caps Lock, sets Right Alt to be Compose and...hmm, actually, I should check whether Control-Alt-Backspace still functions to kill Wayland, or if that stopped working when I moved off X11.

Then I ran # dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration.

But if you're on a non-Debian-based distro, things may work differently.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah I'm French and the Compose key works great, at least for the limited number of diacritics in French.