gnome-cedilla-fix

Versão em português

Configure your Gnome "US-International" keyboard layout to generate a cedilla c (ç) instead of an accented c (ć). This project should be particularly useful to Brazilian Portuguese users with a US-International layout, but could also be used by anyone else who needs to constantly type a cedilla c.

Why do I need this?

The traditional Microsoft "US International" keyboard generates accented characters by sequences of accent+letter, making text typing easy and familiar for latin language users. This behavior was translated into X, and then into the earlier versions of Gnome.

Eventually, most countries defined their own keyboard layouts and Gnome added full support for those. Unfortunately, at some point during this time, the Gnome project decided that '+c (accent+c) should generate an accented c instead of a cedilla c, breaking the widely used US-Intl layout in Gnome for many users.

This move generated substantial frustration, and many bugs have been reported on this topic, without a clear and concise solution. This behavior also causes confusion when migrating users from other operating systems, and makes Linux adoption more difficult for those who need to use cedilla-c regularly.

How do I use this?

At the shell prompt, type:

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/marcopaganini/gnome-cedilla-fix/master/fix-cedilla -O fix-cedilla
chmod 755 fix-cedilla
./fix-cedilla

To activate the changes, log out and re-login. This is usually enough. If you still see the wrong results after the logout/login procedure, reboot your computer.

Uninstallation

To uninstall, just run:

rm ${HOME}/.XCompose

Again, you will need to log out and re-login for changes to take effect.

How does it work?

The script copies your system "Compose" file into ~/.XCompose (your personal compose file), translating every occurrence of an accented-c (ć) into a cedilla c (ç). This should satisfy non-Gnome programs.

Compatibility

I've tested this with a few versions of Debian, Ubuntu, Mint Linux, and Fedora with success. Please let me know about success and failure stories in other versions of Linux.