German keymap with some dead keys?

If you’re using the german keymap of Xorg/XFree86 you’ve perhaps noticed that you can’t write french accents. On the other hand, if you enable the nodeadkeys option you will have to hit ~ twice to get one tilde. After some googling I found this great article by Markus Kuhn that explains the problematic in detail (I confess, I’ve only read the solution part ;-) ).

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Now I wanted to follow his first solution and alter the german keymap on Xorg just to find something really nice. The deadgraveacute-variant is already in there :-)

partial alphanumeric_keys 

xkb_symbols "deadgraveacute" {

    // modify the default German layout to have only acute and grave

    // as dead keys (tilde and circumflex are needed as spacing characters

    // in many programming languages)

    include "de(basic)"

    key  {	[ asciicircum,	degree		],

			[ notsign			]	};

    key  {	[ plus,		asterisk	],

			[ asciitilde,   dead_macron	]	};

    key  {	[ numbersign,   apostrophe	],

			[ grave				]	};

};

So all you have to do is enable it in your xorg.conf by adding following line to your keyboard configuration …

Option "XkbVariant" "deadgraveacute"

… and restart your XServer. This way also Opera’s “Go to Page” dialog will accept tildes ;)