10
4
I am used to using US International as my keyboard layout. However, the implementation appears to differ greatly between Windows and Linux (Gnome, in my case – may well be a GTK issue since GTK behaves the same on Windows).
The layout uses dead keys, for example for keys such as ', ", ^, &c. allowing easy entry of characters with diacritics. On Windows pressing a dead key and then a key that has no pair associated results in the dead key's character (when paired with space) and the character from the second key. Example: Pressing ", a yields “ä”, however, pressing ', s yields “'s”, as there is no pairing for ' and s.
Now, there is a language called English which makes frequent use of exactly those two characters and since it works on Windows to just type them as usual it's muscle memory for me now. Which brings me to my problem:
On Linux (and GTK on Windows), there is a pairing for ' and s (among many others), resulting in ś
(which, in turn, leads to me frequently typing “itś”). So typing “it's” requires me to type ', , s at the end.
There are a few other combinations I'm used to that don't work. Among those is that for non-existant pairs simply nothing is the result. Typing “I'd” results in “I”. Hitting one of those keys twice results in a non-spacing diacritic which breaks my habit of typing strings by first typing both quotation marks (which now result in a non-spacing acute accent or macron).
Long story short: None of the supplied US International layouts appears to function the same as in Windows – are there any that do work identically? Or any chance to configure it that way? While it may be nice to type an s with acute accent or non-spacing diacritics, those aren't exactly common needs for me.
1For anyone wondering why I use US International, instead of something else: I'm from Germany and need to type things like ä, ö, ü, ß at times. But most programming language designers design their languages for exactly one layout so people have to resort to finger-breaking key combinations to enter characters such as curly braces or a backslash. – Joey – 2010-06-19T08:33:42.293