How to add accents etc to letters using the "English (UK)" input source?

Question

How can I use the "English (UK)" input source on Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 with GNOME 3.18 to add accents etc to letters?

Answer 1

If you look at the UK keyboard layout chart:

you'll see a ton of tertiary and quaternary symbols per key.

These are used with the Right Alt for the tertiary and Right Alt+Shift for the quaternary ones, so Right Alt+Shift+M will give you °, so you can now write: -40°C = -40°F

Answer 2

In addition to @Fabby's answer, don't forget about the Compose key Shift+AltGr.

The keys must be pressed in that order, as AltGr+Shift gives the dead-key, as described by Fabby.

For example, Shift+AltGr, o, o gives you °. (Note that you press Shift and then AltGr at the same time, then let go of both keys before pressing o, and o again.)

More examples that can be obtained with Shift+AltGr:

• é: e, '
• ç: c, ,
• ö: o, "
• ß: s, s
• ½: 1, 2
• →: -, >
• — (em-dash): -, -, -

Refer to /usr/share/X11/locale/${LANG}/Compose for a full list. (If the file doesn't exist, use your closest ${LANG}. For example, my ${LANG} is en_GB.UTF-8, but the nearest file for me is /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.)

Answer 3

Some suddenly misconfiguration maked me write spanish tildes like "´a". You didn't tell your keyboard layout.

My .xinputrc was old. I solved only excecuting:

im-config

And I followed choosing 'default'.

If your layout is not in your target accents-language you can write some symbols and all characters with an easy app gucharmap (I have it in Xubuntu, maybe in ubuntu works as well)