How to enter greek alpha under Xorg?

Question

I want to enter greek alpha letter under Xorg. In system xcompose (/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose) there is line:

<dead_greek> <a> : "α" U03B1  # GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA

How to enter it with US keyboard? My locale is en_US.UTF-8. What is this key <dead_greek>?

Answer 1

I just looked up /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose and there is no dead_greek character. There are only dead_acute, dead_iota, and the like to combine with alpha. There is no plain greek alpha in this file.

If you use gnome, look at this answer How can I map a character to a key combination? over at http://askubuntu.com. In your case this would be

Ctrl-Shift-u03b1space

If you have no dead_greek key in your xmodmap output, you can add one yourself. Search for a key you want to use for that purpose, right windows key or right super key for example. Then you can replace the definition of this key with dead_greek

keycode 133 = dead_greek NoSymbol SuperR

Answer 2

you could put this somewhere that runs after your keyboard is set up in X:

xmodmap -pke | awk '/keycode[ \t]+65[ =]/ { $5="dead_greek"; print $0; }' | xmodmap -

for my keyboard that maps shift-space to dead_greek.

Takes a bit of getting-used-to.