I use several keyboards layouts on a regular basis. Two of which make use of dead keys for French language.
$ cat /etc/default/keyboard
XKBLAYOUT=us,fr,fr
XKBVARIANT=dvp,bepo,latin9
BACKSPACE=guess
This morning, after a sudo apt-get upgrade
on Debian 9 (stretch), which may or may not be involved in the problem, dead keys stopped working as dead keys (i.e. hitting ^
then e
produces ^e
instead of ê
), which makes typing french quite difficult.
The new behaviour is persistent after reboot and affects several applications:
- firefox
- thunderbird
- gnome-terminal
- gedit
- nautilus
But not VLC or xterm.. what should I conclude?
How do I get my dead keys working again in all applications?
Best Answer
I had the same problem, on Debian Stretch, and I am using bépo too.
I solved it by using IBUS (yet I guess FCITX and some others can manage it too).
To me, dead keys worked fine in TTY. So I guess the problem «only» happen in software getting keyboard configuration from GUI (X?).
To install Ibus: sudo apt-get install ibus
Ibus comes with a GUI configuration tool, and bépo is available. Setting Ibus to start automatically with the session can help.