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Accepted
Florian Echtler
Asked: 2021-10-21 01:09:58 +0800 CST

How can I type "å" on a non-Danish keyboard?

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I usually have German and English keyboard layouts on Ubuntu 20.04, but I recently started writing in Danish as well, and I can write most special letters (e.g. "æ" via AltGr-a, "ø" via AltGr-o etc.). However, I can't figure out how to get an "å". I guess it should be °a, but the ° isn't a dead key (unlike e.g. ^, ´ etc.). Any ideas how to fix this?

20.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I use the English international with dead keys layout, and on my system I can get å with AltGr+Shift+0 (this combination is the dead key) and then a.

    If that doesn't work for you for some reason, you can also enter the unicode code directly. First press Ctrl+Shift+u to enter unicode mode, then write the relevant code, 00e5 in this case, and finally Enter.

    Another option (suggested by @vanadium in a comment) is to enable "compose key" in your keyboard settings. Then, you can use compose key+o+a to get å. You can chose various keys as the "compose key".

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  2. Based on the discussion with @terdon, I've figured out that I can use xmodmap -e "keycode 0x31 = dead_circumflex dead_abovering grave notsign U2032 U2033 bar bar" to turn the degree symbol on the upper-leftmost key into a dead key, i.e. I can now either type that key twice for a regular degree symbol, or type it once followed by "a" to get the letter "å" I was looking for all the time :-)

    The original definition for the German keyboard is dead_circumflex degree grave notsign U2032 U2033 bar bar, so it's just changing degree to dead_abovering that does the trick.

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