Enter special characters

You can enter and view thousands of characters from most of the world’s writing systems, even those not found on your keyboard. This page lists some different ways you can enter special characters.

Characters

The character map application allows you to find and insert unusual characters, including emoji, by browsing character categories or searching for keywords.

You can launch Characters from the desktop.

Emoji

Insert emoji

  1. Press Ctrl+;.

  2. Browse the categories at the bottom of the dialog or start typing a description in the search field.

  3. Select an emoji to insert.

Compose key

A compose key is a special key that allows you to press multiple keys in a row to get a special character. For example, to type the accented letter é, you can press compose then ' then e.

Keyboards don’t have specific compose keys. Instead, you can define one of the existing keys on your keyboard as a compose key.

Define a compose key

  1. Open the desktop and start typing Settings.

  2. Click on Settings.

  3. Click Keyboard in the sidebar to open the panel.

  4. In the Type Special Characters section, click Compose Key.

  5. Turn the switch on for the Compose Key.

  6. Tick the checkbox of the key that you want to set as the Compose key.

  7. Close the dialog.

You can type many common characters using the compose key, for example:

  • Press compose then ' then a letter to place an acute accent over that letter, such as é.

  • Press compose then ` (back tick) then a letter to place a grave accent over that letter, such as è.

  • Press compose then " then a letter to place an umlaut over that letter, such as ë.

  • Press compose then - then a letter to place a macron over that letter, such as ē.

For more compose key sequences, see the compose key page on Wikipedia.

Code points

You can enter any Unicode character using only your keyboard with the numeric code point of the character. Every character is identified by a four-character code point. To find the code point for a character, look it up in the Characters application. The code point is the four characters after U+.

To enter a character by its code point, press Ctrl+Shift+U, then type the four-character code and press Space or Enter. If you often use characters that you can’t easily access with other methods, you might find it useful to memorize the code point for those characters so you can enter them quickly.

Keyboard layouts

You can make your keyboard behave like the keyboard for another language, regardless of the letters printed on the keys. You can even easily switch between different keyboard layouts using an icon in the top bar. To learn how, see Use alternative keyboard layouts.

Input methods

An Input Method expands the previous methods by allowing to enter characters not only with keyboard but also any input devices. For instance you could enter characters with a mouse using a gesture method, or enter Japanese characters using a Latin keyboard.

To choose an input method, right-click over a text widget, and in the menu Input Method, choose an input method you want to use. There is no default input method provided, so refer to the input methods documentation to see how to use them.