Entering accented characters in emacs

if you need characters with diacritical marks on them in an emacs buffer, you can use:

  M-x iso-accents-mode

(do it again to turn it off).

In this mode, the special characters " ~ ' ` are all "dead keys," which means you have to hit them twice to get the normal behavior.

If you hit a dead key once before typing a normal character, you'll get a combination of the characters. So " u should give you ë