Since I removed gnome and started using a WM only setup (bspwm) apps like st, urxvt, emacs and even alacritty stoped smart managing dead keys. Chrome, brave, firefox and gnome-terminal still do though, why is that?
By smart managing, I mean when you hit tilde ~ and then a you get ã, but if you double hit tilde, you get it alone ~
st and alikes just won't work with dead keys. Won't render ã õ á ó ú í and even ~ ´ ^ . I have to switch the kb layout in order to have at least tilde alone (~) which is very tedious:
setxkbmap -model abnt2 -layout br -option caps:escape -variant nodeadkeys
In my archlinux system everything works fine by default, no extra setup required and I'm using no DE in there also, only dwm as wm
I have tried so many methods for the past 5 months that I can't even recall. Some enlightment would be greatly apreciated.
What's responsible for system-wide dead-key management on Ubuntu?
EDIT:
output of cat /etc/default/keyboard
XKBLAYOUT="br"
BACKSPACE="guess"
XKBVARIANT=""
XKBMODEL="abnt2"
XKBOPTIONS="caps:escape,compose:ralt,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
Enabling the Portuguese (Brazil) keyboard layout, I can do for instance:
Shift+6 followed by A to type ä
And I can do
dead_tilde (to the right of Ç) followed by A to type ã
or
Shift+dead_tilde followed by A to type â
So the most common use of dead keys seems to work fine with the Portuguese (Brazil) layout.
One observation, though, is that you have defined Right Alt as your compose key. That way you can't use that key to access 3:rd and 4:th level symbols which are built-in in your keyboard layout. You may want to consider to disable the compose key or define some other key as the compose key.