I want to type special Spanish characters in Emacs on a MacBook Pro keyboard ... but I have no clue where to start

Question

I am using Emacs 26.3 with macos Catalina and I would like to type the inverted exclamation point and question mark characters. Can someone point me to a link that will get me started towards understanding how to input special characters not available on my standard MacBook Pro keyboard.

Answer 1

Short answer: C-u C\ spanish-prefix RET. The characters you mentioned can then be typed as

~? => ¿
~! => ¡

Long answer: read the emacs documentation starting at Language Environments, plus the description of 'spanish-prefix' in lisp/leim/quail/latin-pre.el to see what other characters that method supports, and to see what other input methods are available, such as catalan-prefix and spanish-keyboard.

Answer 2

I just found out this is how you do it: (setq ns-alternate-modifier nil)

I was instead using the insert-chart bound to C-x 8 which is very painful

edit: thank you all for the interest xD

I'm native spanish speaker and I really need to introduce characters like á, é, í etc... otherwise my notes make no sense! I'm also a mac book pro user, trying spacemacs + org-mode for a change. To finish contextualizing my answer, I must clarify that I use my keyboard with the following changes:

• Key Caps Lock maps to Control
• Key Control maps to Command
• Key Option maps to Caps Lock
• Key Command maps to Option

In this universe, I order to produce an á symbol I press Key Command-e a. I find this very comfortable. As soon as I started taking notes in org-mode I realized I couldn't type Key Command-e, didn't understand why.

I've found the solution and now I have a theory that attempts to explain what happens, first, the solution:

• Go to your spacemacs config file SPC f e d and look for function dotspacemacs/user-config
• Add (setq ns-alternate-modifier nil) to the function's body, it disables Emacs interpretation of Key Command
• Add (setq ns-command-modifier 'meta) to the function's body, it remaps Emacs meta key to Control. I realized later that I needed this remap, as Command can't work as meta anymore, because the previous setting makes Emacs forget about that key completely
• Reload your config with SPC f e R

Theory behind it:

Emacs was consuming key Command-e as M-e which is bound to forward-sentence the solution is then to (setq ns-alternate-modifier nil) to stop Emacs from reacting to key Command and allowing the OS to bundle Command-e + {{followingChar}} as a single keypress later on, delivering this compound keypress a single char to Emacs.

This generates a new problem: How do you call M-e now?, this is why (setq ns-command-modifier 'meta) is required. In my keyboard configuration this has the effect of making key Control meta which is incredible handy. so M-e is now Ctrl-e

Before finding this solution I was barely surviving by invoking C-x 8 ' a for a single á.