You may wonder how to type accented characters in Linux. Fortunately, it’s easy to do so with a keystroke or a character map application.

Accented Characters and Unicode

Likewise other modern operating systems, Linux is able to use accented characters because it supports Unicode.

Unicode arose as more people with languages other than American English started to use computers. Many languages have characters with diacritical marks. ASCII didn’t have a way to represent them on the computer.

Unicode solves this problem by defining character sets with code points for each character. Unicode also made emojis possible and has changed the way we communicate, though this wasn’t an original design decision.

Using the Ctrl + Shift + U Key Combination

You can type accented characters immediately by using Ctrl + Shift + U keystrokes.

To do this, hold down those keys, followed by the code point number that you want to type. You can insert any code point you want, even emojis.

You can find the list of Unicode code points online, including on Wikipedia, for all the character sets. You might want to memorize the ones you use frequently.

Using a Character Map

GNOME Characters application

If you don’t want to constantly search online for any characters you use or type keystrokes, you can use a character map application.

KDE Plasma and GNOME offer character map applications. They work similarly to ones you may have used on macOS or Windows. You can search for characters and then copy and paste them into where you want your text to go. They will often display the character combination for characters you would want to memorize.

If you don’t have one installed, you can install GNOME Characters on your Linux machine by running the following command.

On Debian and Ubuntu, type: 

        sudo apt install gnome-characters

On Arch: 

        sudo pacman -Syu gnome-characters

And on RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux, etc: 

        sudo dnf install gucharmap

Now You Can Type Accented Characters on Linux

It's easy to use Ctrl + Shift + U key combinations or a character map application to type accented characters on Linux. While modern Linux supports Unicode, ASCII text has a rich history in Unix-like systems. But there's more to the relationship between ASCII and Unicode.