Debian Trixie and Accented Characters

I live in New Zealand where there is frequent use of words and placenames in the Māori language. Many Māori words use macron-accented vowels. I’m also sometimes wanting to write words in German which frequently use the umlaut accented vowels as well as the double-s or scharfes s character “ß”.

Also in New Zealand, the US English keyboard layout is typically used. This keyboard layout has no accented characters so the question comes up about how to enter such accented characters.

Debian is a popular linux distribution that is widely used. In the previous version of Debian (Bookworm), I had used EurKey to allow for accented character input but with the newest Debian version (Trixie) this no longer seems to be necessary; the ability to enter accented characters seems to be built in.

Open the Settings application, choose the “Keyboard” options and configure the “Compose Key” to be “Right Alt”. Now is it possible to enter the accented characters by typing Right-Alt + modifier and then the character to alter;