Re: How to type german umlaut/german characters in Mozilla mail

[Nick Croft <nicko@acay.com.au>]

* J.S.Sahambi (jsahambi@iitg.ernet.in) wrote:
> I am using Debian/unstable with English language. Occasionaly, I need to 
> write letters in Deutsch. I would like to know how to write german 
> umlauts and other Deutsch specific characters while still having a 
> english version of Mozilla-mail.
> 
There are a number of keymaps available to any debian user in
 /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/

specifically de and de_CH (Swiss).

Simply type in a terminal 'setxkbmap de' and your keyboard will be German.
To revert to (for instance) a US keyboard, type 'setkbmap us'.

I have such commands in my shell rc (.zshrc) aliased, e.g
alias de='setxkbmap de' and
alias us='setxkbmap=de'.

This is all due to advances made by XFree86. The old days are gone, it's
easy now.

And if you wish, you can write new keymaps for yourself in
/etc/X11/xkb/symbols such that the specific German characters are easily
available without the brackets and slashes being moved away from where you
expect them to be.

Happy mapping,

Nick