Well there are times when I've occasionally needed to input a foreign characters. In one, we had someone from Japan staying here and they wanted to send email. I never managed to get Kanji input happening in KDE/X, despite the fact that it was being displayed fine. The fact that I don't speak Japanese never helped me in my quest to get it working. That was a while ago and I haven't really looked since.
Next came the issue of inputting accented european characters. Only
this time I had a bit more luck. Turns out it's quite simple to do this in
VIM. First of all, make sure you are using the ISO-8859-1 character set
(or equivilent). By typing ':digraphs" you get a list of characters and their
corrensponding digraph. As an example you'll see:
A> Â 194
On the left-hand side you have the digraph, that is, the two chracters
that you have to input to get the character in the middle to be displayed.
The last number is the ASCII decimal number for that character (you can
input that as well to ge the same result). Pressing CTRL-K will allow
you to enter these characters. So as an example, if I want to do an
a-umlaut (ä), type (without the angle brackets of course):
CTRL-K <a><:>
Alternatively, if you enable the 'digraph' option (enter the command
'set digraph' in VIM) then you can do the same as above only by doing:
<:><backspace><a>
Well that gets around most things for inputting european accented characters, but what if I want to input them in an X program (or in another console program)? That is one thing that I've yet to solve. One method which worked was to set the keyboard map in XFree86 4 to 'us_intl'. In this case when you enter say 'b"ah', you would get 'bäh'. Unfortunately though if you want to enter an actual apostrophes, quote, etc then you have to enter the key twice. I found that to be too inconvenient considering I only ever have to do this very occasionally.
I then read that another way that it can be done is by using a 'Compose'
key. In XFree86 3 you could configure such a key in XF86Config under
the keyboard section with:
RightCtl Compose
But such an option seems to have disappeared from XFree86 4. Another
google search and I found that you can configure it in ~/.Xmodmap with:
keycode 115 = Multi_key
In this example that should be configuring the metakey (the one with the Microsoft logo on it) to be the Compose key. So one should expect that typing <meta>b"ah would work, but it doesn't for me! So overall I have digraphs working in vim but nothing else at this stage.