Accented characters on Emacs

Question

When I type an accented character (eg ñ, ç, ã), it doesn't self-insert immediately, but rather displays itself on the minibuffer as if it was a prefix key (eg ç -> ç-). Is there a way to change this behavior? I can't even capture it with <f1>kç to find out what is happening.

Thanks!

Answer 1

CTRL+x 8 CTRL+h

What this will do is display a help window with all of the key sequences for accented characters which are currently available to you.

For example:

Key     binding

C-x 8 <     «

C-x 8 =     ¯

C-x 8 >     »

C-x 8 ?     ¿

C-x 8 C     ©

C-x 8 L     £

C-x 8 P     ¶

Answer 2

Do the Emacswiki internationalization pages help? How about the advice in language environment?

Edit: See input methods -- and in a new buffer, I can do

• M-x set-input-method to 'latin-1-prefix' (which also TAB-completes) and you get
• Umlaute äöüÄÖÜ (¨ followed by vowel)
• Sharp-s ß (¨ followed by s)
• Accents éèô (fwd or backtick or ^ followed by vowel)

and they all display fine.