I am on Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS. I have a German keyboard layout. I often type in different languages. So I will need various diacritics on/under/through the letters. I am used to type some of them with dead keys and some with key combinations. In my keyboard layout setting, it shows that I have a “German” layout without any extras (no no-dead something or whatever). I have tried the other dead/no-dead layouts out of curiosity, but that didn’t solve my issue. I can type several letters with an acute diacritic by pressing ACUTE, then the base letter. E.g. if I type ACUTE and then “E”, I get “é”. The ACUTE button sits in line after the numbers: “8” “9” “0” “ß” ACUTE BACKSPACE, and according to the layout that can be displayed via System settings > Hardware > Keyboard > Layouts > German (in the list) > Show…, it can generate glyphs with the diacritics ACUTE, GRAVE, CEDILLA, and OGONEK. This variety is what I want and what I am used to. To access these “dead accents”, I used to press the plain ACUTE key for getting an acute on the next plain letter pressed, SHIFT + ACUTE gave a grave, RIGHT ALT + ACUTE gave a cedilla, and SHIFT + RIGHT ALT + ACUTE gave an ogonek. Today I realised that the dead acute cannot make neither “Ć” nor “ć” (latin C with acute) anymore. The first level of the dead ACUTE key, pressed and followed by “C” should generate C with acute, but it adds a cedilla instead. I expected the layout might be switched, so I checked if the third-level combination RIGHT ALT + ACUTE, which used to gave a cedilla, now gives an acute, but no luck: it gives a cedilla, too. I rely on C-acute a lot for typing Polish, Serbian, etc. names in German documents. My physical keyboard has a German layout printed on, and I want to stick to that even when using diacritics, so no frequent change of layouts, please. It used to work when I tried it last time, but today it failed. I can only copy “Ć” and “ć” from Wikipedia, which is a pain for managing long lists of names. I could even type another letter instead and then search+replace with what I wanted. Of course, this is no neat solution. Please, how can I get the obvious behavior back?
1 Answer
I would like to see a real answer to this (or at least somebody pointing to the change in Ubuntu that resulted in this behavior, because if I knew where the change was made, I could suggest a fix), but for now here's a work around.
I'm using XCompose to set each keybidings and Ubuntu 20.04 and derivatives (Linux Mint 20) seem to ignore/override the <acute><c> sequence and always generate the cedilla (ç), even when you have it set to generate Latin Letter C with Acute (ć). BUT you can set a different key sequence to still generate Latin Letter C with Acute. I've used <semicolon><c> because <comma><c> also appears to be ignored.
Here is the relevant part of my .XCompose file:
# see http://askubuntu.com/a/71335
include "%L" # import the default Compose file for your locale
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <C> : "Ć" U0106 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <C> <apostrophe> : "Ć" U0106 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <c> : "ć" U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <c> <apostrophe> : "ć" U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
# Newer Ubuntu versions seem to have a hard override of the above, so here's plan B
<Multi_key> <semicolon> <C> : "Ć" U0106 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <C> <semicolon> : "Ć" U0106 # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <semicolon> <c> : "ć" U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <c> <semicolon> : "ć" U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
For setting up an XCompose file, see this answer to a different question.
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