Forgive me, I don't want to sound xenophobic but this seems preposterous to me. So much energy wasted. I am deeply grateful to the guys who were developing keyboard standards in our country that I don't have to go through such waste. When we want to use "o" with accent we just press right ALT with "o". Simple and fast. Frankly speaking, this is first time I hear about such weird combination just to get local characters, in western countries ofc. PC keyboard is not mechanical one. Why someone would copy the same behavior is beyond me.
If you write in a single language that has only a few combinations, sure. But as the number of diacritics - letter combinations increase, dead keys become a more attractive solution.
With just two or three Western European languages to write in, you can easily have grave, acute and circumflex accents, umlauts, tildes, plus a couple one-off letters (like ß for German, ç for French, or å/æ for Scandinavian languages). Combining those with every vowel they can apply to grows too much for the poor Alt key.
The US-International layout runs into this problem. Since Alt + A = Á, if you want to type Ä or Å or Æ in a single keypress you have to use Alt + Q, W, or Z respectively, which is hardly intuitive. And if you want À or Ã, you're SOL.
The other main solution is to have a hotkey for switching language layouts - typing in each language will be slightly faster, but when I tried it I frequently forgot which layout I was on and had to stop, delete my mangled output, switch language, and type again. I find dead keys much more friendly to muscle-memory.
I find it useful on a Mac to use some of the shortcuts for accents and diacritics in the default US-English keyboard layout, since I occasionally do have to type accented characters, or type text in a non-English language and don't want the hassle of changing keyboard setup or going through the Unicode menu. They all involve holding Option and pressing the key, though (for example, 'à' is Option-` followed by typing the 'a'; Option-e gets acute, Option-n gets tilde, Option-i gets circumflex and Option-u gets diaresis; there are also shortcuts for some common specific characters like ç and å).
It makes perfect sense if you know anything about Portuguese.
'àquele' is the preposition 'a' + 'aquele'. Grave accents are only used to mark contractions such as this, and the circumflex and acute accents - which denote differences in vowel quality and stress - are much more common, which is why it makes perfect sense to prioritise ease of typing for those two over the grave accent.
> When we want to use "o" with accent we just press right ALT with "o". Simple and fast.
That's fine for ò I guess, but then how do you type ô, ö and ó?
But as has been said elsewhere, this thread is confusing dead keys, which have nothing to do with fonts: typing the ^ key followed by the o key enters a single character ô, with combining characters where the character ̂ followed by the character o is rendered as ̂o (which should look the same as ô) (edit looks like this works fine on my fixed-width font when editing, but not so fine on the regular proportional font when displaying the comment, it's sadly quite usual for fonts to mishandle combining characters).
Here, the issue is that the standalone non-combining ` (as well as ´, ¨ and ¸) is handled by this font as if they were combining, thus doubly confusing users with dead-key keyboards.
I guess it all depends on the frequency of such characters in the given language. For example, in french keyboards, we have dedicated keys for 'é', 'é', 'à', 'ç' and 'ù', because they are incredibly frequent. On the other hand, 'â', 'ê', 'î', 'ô', 'û', 'ë' and 'ï' are less frequent, so they are generated using modifiers.
I'm quite glad of that, actually, it would be really annoying if we had to keep using modifiers every two words. I know french people who use English keyboards, they just usually forget about accents totally instead of using dedicated modifiers.
