Inserting special characters..

[Leo Spalteholz <leo@spalteholz.ca>]

Ok, maybe this is not exactly debian related but...

I switched to debian about two years ago and havent looked back but 
there is still one windows feature that I miss a lot.  In windows, 
you could insert special characters (like äüÜÄ etc) by holding ALT 
and then typing the ascii value of the character so ALT-132 would be 
ä.  Now in linux the easiest way I've found is to go into 
kcharselect, find the character, copy it to the clipboard and paste 
it into the document.  Naturally this takes about 80 times as long 
and is a huge PITA..   Does anyone know of a comparable way to insert 
special characters in linux?  Soemthing thats fast, like through a 
keyboard shortcut or similar...

Thanks a bunch,
Leo