Umlauts on English keyboards

Micha is just sitting next to me, writing a new blog post. He’s writing in German with an English keyboard, so he has to encode umlauts like ä with an ä . I can not watch any longer, here is the trick.

Still blogged about it, you can create such additional keys with Xmodmap. So choose a key, get its key code for example with xbindkeys -k and create a file $HOME/.Xmodmap with the following syntax:

keycode XXX = YYY

XXX ist the code of your key and YYY is that what should happen. For example:

keycode  137 = adiaeresis Adiaeresis
keycode  139 = udiaeresis Udiaeresis
keycode  141 = odiaeresis Odiaeresis 
keycode  143 = ssharp ssharp

That gives you an ä/Ä on the key with code 137 and so on. To let the file take effect just run xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap . Btw xmodmap -pke will give you the actual running keymap. So Micha, no need to type to much ;)