Comment 18 for bug 518056

Dear Cousteau,

The issue would be easily solved by the introduction of a keyboard layout with the 'c = ç option (which, at this point, seems to be default in some cases). I am far from understanding how are the technical issues behind this. The usability issue is, on the hand, greater than simply an apparent "ilogical" choice of using 'c as ç instead of the actual accented c. The thing is that Cs with accents are used by a small portion of the worlds population, which use also many other accentuations (as inverted grave ^ accents over some letters) and different alfabets, which require highly specific (and available!) keyboard layouts. On the other side, portuguese writers use rather frequently US-International keyboards, as the ONLY issue with dead keys is that of cedilla, and in portuguese accented Cs do not exist. French writers could also claim the same, but as they use in general a totally different keyboard (azerty), they have their own keyboard layout and are satisfied with its default options.

Therefore, this is, indeed, an specific issue affecting only portuguese writers (5% of the worlds population, I guess), and, if the default is changed, I cannot imagine that it will bother anyone, except, maybe, very few people which want to write an accented Cs for some specific reason in some very particular context using a US-International keyboard with dead-keys, and in those cases I think it is not a big deal to search for that character in the special character table.

Anyway, I am totally in favor of having more than one keyboard layout option with one and the other options, it is really an important issue for the popularization of Linux in Brazil. I don't know where to put my face whenever I install linux to someone and I cannot make them write a cedilla in an standard, easy and system-wide manner.

Leandro.