If you write in a single language that has only a few combinations, sure. But as the number of diacritics - letter combinations increase, dead keys become a mor

If you write in a single language that has only a few combinations, sure. But as the number of diacritics - letter combinations increase, dead keys become a more attractive solution. With just two or three Western European languages to write in, you can easily have grave, acute and circumflex accents, umlauts, tildes, plus a couple one-off letters (like ß for German, ç for French, or å/æ for Scandinavian languages). Combining those with every vowel they can apply to grows too much for the poor Alt key. The US-International layout runs into this problem. Since Alt + A = Á, if you want to type Ä or Å or Æ in a single keypress you have to use Alt + Q, W, or Z respectively, which is hardly intuitive. And if you want À or Ã, you're SOL. Dead keys (also in the US-International layout) solve this problem. I know which keys make the tilde, umlaut, both types of accents, and circumflex. If I want the bare symbol (or a quote in the case of umlaut) I press spacebar after the symbol key, otherwise I press any applicable letter to output the modified version. For example, I'm pretty sure there's a key combination for ç, but I don't remember what it is (Alt + C is ©); however I did remember that I could type it as ' + c. The other main solution is to have a hotkey for switching language layouts - typing in each language will be slightly faster, but when I tried it I frequently forgot which layout I was on and had to stop, delete my mangled output, switch language, and type again. I find dead keys much more friendly to muscle-memory.