Q: US keyboard layout and umlauts ?

[Gregor Hoffleit <flight@mathi.uni-heidelberg.de>]

I hope this problem is not too off-topic: In potato, how can I write
german umlauts with an traditional US keyboard layout ?

I guess it's not too uncommon that German developers like me use an US
keyboard layouts, but sometimes you'd like to write German texts as
well. The default US layouts for console and X11 Xkb don't seem to
support diaeresis's at all.

For the console, I managed to modify /etc/kbd/default.map and add a
few lines which map some altgr combinations to [aou]diaeresis. But now
I don't feel very comfortable editing Xkb's configurations files to
get the thing working with X11.

All I would really need is a single key which was mapped to
dead-diaeresis consistently in console and X11.


Thanks in advance for any hints,

	Gregor