The compose key and its composition tables are a thing of beauty — you can even compose an uppercase ß (ss) these days: ẞ (SS). It's such a shame that neither Windows nor MacOS (or the mobile operating systems for that matter) provide this feature out-of-the-box.

Mac OS has supported a similar system since the classic era – for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key leads with Compose + ~ + n = ñ, which is Option + ~ + n on Mac OS.

https://forlang.wsu.edu/help-pages/help-pages-keyboards-os-x...

The newer system is simply holding down keys to see accented variants which feels very natural on touchscreen devices but is slower than keyboard shortcuts if you know them.

Mac layouts are arbitrary trees (or probably DAGs, but I've never checked) so it wouldn't be difficult to port an X Compose file.

(XKB manages to be both over-complicated and under-capable.)

I like sticking to ASCII when I stick to English. (Of course, when I write in other languages, I use UTF-8.)

That doesn't work outside America, where accents are often retained (café, façade, naïve) and £ or € is often needed.

I'm OK with that. I'm in the U.S., and I comprehend my non-American English-speaking colleagues, but I don't try to be like them. The same should go the other way around. We're NOT going to standardize on one of the flavors of English -- variety is good.

Recognize, however, that it does annoy those of us outside America when something very straightforward — like the ö in my friend's name, or writing £ — doesn't work. Imagine moving to a hypothetical country with no letter C, and being told your name "must" be kryptonektor, or instead seeing %ryptone%tor.

It's fairly common for a lot of computer software to standardize on American English and American conventions, yet several of these are unique to under 1% of the world's population. This morning, a new installation of Microsoft Outlook asked for a location and timezone, yet still showed the weather for Washington DC in Fahrenheit above the calendar. The weather location was easily changed, but not the units. A well-known messaging app I installed last week shows my location as "K%©benhavn", for someone in Russia no character in the location is intelligible. A receipt from a restaurant in Europe has only about a 95% chance of correctly showing €, and maybe a 1/50 chance of showing the date in the wrong order. On an international flight between two non-English places, it's fairly common for the in-flight display to show miles and Fahrenheit with English, which I don't understand, and kilometres and Celsius with (say) Arabic, which I can't understand either — along with the other 99% of non-American connecting passengers.

I have no issue with the minor spelling differences and changes of idiom.

So yes, we mostly understand the Americans, except their measuring units and paper sizes.

> The same should go the other way around.

But it often doesn't.

Here in New Mexico ñ is very common in place names. And I’ve known people with accented names who, though they don’t insist on it, appreciate (sometimes visibly brightening) when their names are spelled accurately.

My own name has an accent. I am always surprised when someone gets that right, but I don't insist on it.

It would help if you didn't have to install special software to get a compose key.

On Linux, you don't.

> setxkbmap -option compose:menu

For example. There will be a dialog somewhere too.

> There will be a dialog somewhere too.

In Ubuntu Unity and — I think — Gnome Shell:

Keyboard settings » Shortcuts » Typing » Compose key

And KDE, IIRC: system settings, input settings, keyboard, advanced, compose key.

For an average computer, you're neglecting the step where you install Linux.

Even specially enabling it is a real barrier in many ways.

Learn to use shift-option-hyphen, more like.