As I mentioned previously, I’m learning Spanish so worrying about accented characters has become a way of life. The above post talks about one of Prot’s videos that discusses how to change the input method for Emacs only rather than at the system level. That’s important because changing the system keyboard can interfere with what Emacs is expecting.
Sometimes, though, you want to enter a single accented character such as with résumé or piña colada in otherwise normal English text. Chris Maiorana has just the thing for this. He has both a post and a video that explains how to do it. They’re definitely worth your attention even if you never need to write in anything besides English. The TL;DR is that you call insert-char and ask for the non-spacing accent mark. Watch the video to see all the details. It’s only 3 minutes and 12 seconds so you slip it in at almost any time.
There are a couple of things worth mentioning about his method:
- You don’t need to highlight the character you want to accent. Just put the point immediately after it. That makes it easy to put in the accents as you type.
- Rather than using Meta+x
insert-charyou can simply use Ctrl+x 8 Return and then type the accent you want.
I wish I had known about this method earlier. I always did it by looking up the accented char itself rather than simply adding the accent to whatever character I needed.