Some characters like quotes only appear after pressing spacebar, how to change this?

Question

After installing 11.10 the behaviour of my keyboard changed. I now suddenly need to press spacebar after typing some special characters like quotes to make them appear. How can I fix this? This wasn't the case in 11.04.

Solution 1

It sounds like you have a keyboard layout with dead keys selected. In this mode, pressing " followed by something like a will generate the character ä. Pressing Space cancels the dead key behaviour to give you a plain quote character.

You can turn off dead keys support as follows:

1. From System Settings, open the Keyboard Layout control panel.
2. Click the button marked with a plus sign in the lower left of the window, and add the new layout. For example, if you currently have English (US, international with dead keys) selected, add English (US).
3. Remove the old keyboard layout by selecting it in the list and pressing the "minus" button in the lower left of the window.

Solution 2

Found this question from googling on my issue - having to press tilde twice to get it to print out. I think what James said should work perfectly. However, in case you're not running GNOME - e.g. I'm on Xubuntu - this achieves the same thing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Then you go with one of the generic models, see the difference between 101, 104, 105 keys here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard

I went with 104, no dead keys, en-us. Rebooted and it works like a charm.

Solution 3

Notice that this only happens when selecting "English (US) with dead keys". Selecting "English (international AltGr dead keys)" will not require a space for quotes, but typing AltGr+a will produce á.

Comments

[Luis Alvarado]

Correct. This is also how a spanish or french keyboard works. You press the key and then space to see the letter that you want. +1 for the answer.

[Frank Nocke]

Local access works like a charm. Only have to problem over remote desktop (xrdp). Using mate GUI. Choose a layout won't populate with entries. (Thus an empty Country and Variants pulldown... :/)