My compose key suddenly stopped working few days ago, without me doing anything, apparently. I set it to right ctrl, but it doesn't work anymore. If I try another key (e.g. right alt), it doesn't work anymore. Anyway the system recognizes that that key is "special" and will not work for anything else (e.g. if right ctrl is set as compose key, I cannot use it to select multiple items, it's exactly as a dead key).
Running Ubuntu Studio: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS with XFCE 4.14 as desktop environment.
What I have tried
- To set the compose key I edit the Settings > Keyboard > Layout, it just doesn't work. The rest of the layout settings are:
Keyboard model: Generic 105-key PC (intl.)
Change layout option: -
Keyboard layout: English (US)
- The file
/etc/default/keyboard
contains the following lines:
# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE
# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.
XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBOPTIONS="compose:rctrl"
BACKSPACE="guess"
I have tried to edit it directly or via the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
: I can edit it but the changes have no effect, the compose key still doesn't work (even after reboot).
- I have read in many answers and comments about the files
~/.xsessionrc
and~/.xsession
. I did not have these files (but I have the~/.xsession-errors
file), so I tried to create them and write a single line:
/usr/bin/setxkbmap -option "compose:rctrl"
None of these methods worked. If you don't know how to fix my compose key, do you know alternative ways to quickly digit accented letters? I have a english keyboard on my laptop but I often have to write emails in Italian or Spanish, and I need accented letters for those languages.
setxkbmap -query
in terminal?