Tá mé go maith. (I am well).

Getting fadas (acute accents in Irish) on my Linux systems proved to be simpler than I thought. I altered the keyboard section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf to look like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc101"
Option "XkbLayout" "us,us(intl)"
Option "XkbOptions" "grp:lwin_switch"
EndSection

and restarted X.

Then in any editing window (including this one), to get á (a with an acute accent), I press the left Windows key (that flag-like thing between the ctrl and the alt keys–irony noted!) and the ‘ key together, then type a. Similarly for other accented letters. The same technique works for grave accents (è), umlauts (ö), and other accents as well. The idea is that you are using the left windows key to switch to the “US-International” keyboard layout.

There are many other keyboard layouts as well; I can see myself wasting a lot of time doing a lot of experiments with this. Some keyboards don’t have windows keys, but you can substitute something else.

There is probably a simpler way to do this in KDE, but this is more general (no assumptions about window managers or desktop environments) and so allows me to use a lighter system like Xfce.