As someone with a spanish keyboard, I can confirm.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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And here I was wondering for ages now, who in his right mind would have chosen the incredibly cumbersome to type triple backticks combo as delimiters for code sections in markdown...
And now this article just told me that the backtick is just another normal key outside of Germany...
But serious question: How do you type characters with the back accent above them? Or you just don't?
On US English keyboards, there isn't a universal, standard way to do it at the keyboard level.
I use Linux, and bind my Menu key on my keyboard to Compose. With Compose, I can tap "Compose-backtick-e" and get "è".
Emacs has its own input methods, as do other environments.
I simply made my own keyboard layout. Accent grave is just a single press for me, altgr+accent is the "normal" combining one. Also changed äö to () and shift+äö to [].
It's not that hard, it's just a markup file I had to copy+modify and put in some folder.
Legit possible solution.
But I normally omit changing the behaviour of the standard keyboard as it will bite me the moment that I am not on my own computer.
Only exception:
I use a similar approach to disable the Tab-Key (and in one case, on a machine with a stripped down keyboard missing the "Pos1" and "End" keys, use Tab and Shift-Tab to emulate these).
Meh, how often do you really do some serious work where you're not on your own hardware? Depends on your job I guess, if you're company tech support and walk around to people's PCs the whole time, but if you're a programmer or similar, when are you really not going to do your work on your PC?
It's not like you can't work with a default layout afterwards, you're just going to be a bit slower on one. It really didn't happen very often for me in years of working.
Meh, how often do you really do some serious work where you’re not on your own hardware?
As a SW dev in a predev lab / tech demonstration environment: Unfortunately much more often than you would perhaps think...
On macOS you either use dead keys (option + backtick and then a letter will add a grave accent, like à) or just press and hold down the letter to get a little pop-up diacritics picker.
How does macOS discern between wanting to use diacritics and just trying to write the letter multiple times in a row?
And how do you choose the version you would like to use (I assume by selecting the numbers printed below)?
And yes, I have never used a Mac in my whole life up to now and am therefore completely clueless ;-)
In typical Apple fashion, ‘that’s the neat part - it doesn’t’. If you want to be able to hold a letter to type it repeatedly, you have to disable the diacritics popup with a console command.
It’s the sort of stubborn ‘getting in my way’ feature that drives some people nuts when using a Mac, but in my experience it’s far more useful to be able to easily type accented characters than it is to be able to save half a second on the rare occasions I want to type ‘ooooooooooooooh’.
And yeah, if the popup is open you either hit the number displayed under the character you want or use the mouse to click on it.
Thanks, actually sounds like a useful feature!
Although as a SW dev I do regularly depend on the repeating character behaviour, but usually not for normal letters.
But typing stuff like:
/*********************************************************/
is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character...
But typing stuff like: /*********************************************************/ is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character…
If you're coding, your code editor may have some way to input that.
Some people who frequently input something like that use a snippet system.
In emacs, hitting most keys (like "*") runs self-insert-command. That takes a numeric parameter, so one can just do something like / M-5 M-6 * / (slash, hold Alt, type 56, hit asterisk, slash) to get a slash followed by 56 asterisks followed by a slash.
I'm not really a serious vim person, but I'm sure that vim has similar functionality.
searches
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5054128/repeating-characters-in-vim-insert-mode
Looks like, in insert mode, / Control-o 56 a * Esc a /. Probably not using correct vim terminology for the keystrokes, but you get my drift.
I have to reserve the limited keystroke remembering capacity of my aging brain to more crucial stuff, I am afraid...
Also, the tiny time span passing while mindlessly holding down the "*" key is a welcome pause to clear your mind, take a short breath and gather your thoughts on what the heck you are supposed to be writing in the comment body following the /**********/ line. ;-)
That would still work - asterisk isn’t a letter that can be accented, so the popup wouldn’t appear and the key would repeat as normal.
I switched to a US keyboard with EURkeys keyboard layout (alt-u for ü etc) and I'm very happy with it. Common keys for programming like backslash, square/curly brackets, pipe, tilde and of course the backticks are just horrible to use on a German keyboard.