Unwanted Accents on Letters? Turn Off Dead Keys

Open a text box and press the apostrophe key once, then stop. If nothing appears on screen, the key is a dead key: it is waiting to see what you press next so it can combine the two.

Press a vowel and you get an accented letter. Press a consonant and most layouts give you the apostrophe followed by the consonant, which is why the problem seems to come and go.

The layouts that behave this way are usually named United States-International,UK Extended, ABC – Extended on macOS, or any layout for a language that uses accents natively.

There is a single rule that removes almost all the friction: accent key, then space bar gives the standalone character.

• ' then Space → a plain apostrophe
• " then Space → a plain double quote
• ` then Space → a plain backtick
• ~ then Space → a plain tilde
• ^ then Space → a plain caret

Worth keeping if you write in more than one language, because the same layout gives youáéñüçin two keystrokes each, far faster than any Alt code.

The backtick is the one that catches developers out, since it is needed constantly in Markdown and JavaScript template literals and is a dead key on most international layouts.

Open Settings, Time & Language,Language & Region, then your language's Language options. Under Installed keyboards, add US or United Kingdom — the plain variant without the word International or Extended — then remove the international one.

Remove rather than reorder. Leaving both installed meansWin + Space can put you back on the dead-key layout by accident, and the symptom returns with no obvious trigger.

System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources,Edit. Add ABC and remove ABC – Extended.

Note that macOS gives you accents without any dead-key layout at all: hold a vowel down and an accent menu appears, or use Option + E followed by the letter. That is why removing the extended layout costs a Mac user almost nothing.

In GNOME, Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources: remove the variant whose name includesintl or dead keys and add the plain one. From a terminal,setxkbmap us switches immediately for the current session.

If you want accents without dead keys, the Compose key is the cleaner mechanism — theLinux Compose key guidecovers setting it up.

If the apostrophe key does produce a character immediately but the wrong kind of apostrophe — curly instead of straight — that is autocorrect rather than a dead key. The distinction matters because the fixes are unrelated.

Seequotation marks coming out wrongandautocorrect changing symbolsfor that case, andcurly versus straight quotesfor when the difference actually breaks something.

If you removed the layout but still need the occasional accent, theaccent typerbuilds them without any layout change, andletters with accentslists the Alt code and Mac shortcut for each one.