on linux, using us-mac:

è: option/r-alt+`

ê: option/r-alt+i

ë: option/r-alt+u

(for example, option+` followed by e will do è)

i mostly use us-mac because i'm used to using option to type accents and because i can keep my en keyboard and type on pt-br without problems.

I vastly prefer the compose key method on Linux. You almost never have to worry about how to type a character. Type compose, hit something that vaguely looks like the accent you want, and then the letter.

Compose, ", e => ë

Compose, ', e => é

Compose, ^, e => ê

I so wish this system was available more universally.

What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿?

Apple's consistent use of the "optional" characters is a lot like the old C-64 with the graphical extras available at the push of two buttons.

Without looking anything up, I'd guess "compose-,-c" and "compose-o-a", for the first two, and that turns out to be correct.

I had to try a few things for the degree symbol, but I guessed it on my third try (it's "compose-o-o"). Once I knew that, my first guess for ¿ was "compose-?-?", which also turned out to be correct.

But as the other reply said, you can always look them up if necessary, which you'd almost certainly have to do with the Mac's system of "option + some arbitrarily selected key".

> What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿?

Those are all covered:

http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/

Just hold e for e view seconds and chose which version you want.

It might be easier if you have to use it infrequently, however accents with deadkeys are much faster if you type. Can't imagine typing even a paragraph while having to pause, even for a second, on every accented character (mind you, in some languages such as greek, almost every word has an accented vowel, sometimes two).

I'm barely monolingual let alone bilingual, so I'm honestly curious: how does spell check do here? Are you able to type most words without the accents and let an auto-correct tool auto-magically correct things?

I can only speak about Greek. That doesn't work very well there because many times a word is accented depending on its role in the sentence or its grammar (and via versa).

So if you just apply automatic spell-correction, you have to proof read it afterwords, which is more of a hassle than accenting it manually -because it's a more cognitive work.

Correct accents in greek matter a lot. Reading incorrectly accented words make comprehending quite a bit painful and slow, my guess is because the brain expects something, receives something else and then tries automatically to make sense of what is trained to know it's wrong, slowing the whole process down.

Somewhat on topic: a while back I turned on international keyboard support on my iPhone. When I need to write something in French on the phone, I tap the globe icon on the keyboard, it swaps to AZERTY, and the autocorrect features start picking up French and correcting accents into the text for me. Is useful :)