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Delete just the accent from a character System
If you type in a language that requires accents (such as Spanish), OS X provides a quick way to make them and delete them without changing your keyboard layout. To make an accent, hold Option then press E, and you will see the accent character. Then press any other key, such as A, E, I, O, or U, and it will place that character beneath the accent. You can also make other characters such as ñ with Option-N then N or ç with Option-C. But most of you probably knew that already.

If you want to delete the accents easily, however, OS X provides a very useful shortcut: Control-Delete. Try typing an accented character and then using Control-Delete instead of just plain Delete. When you do, OS X will convert the accented character into a normal character. I do not know if this works for other characters other than the ones I know from Spanish and Portuguese, but I do know that it works in 10.4 and 10.5.

Here's a list of all the handy keyboard shortcuts OS X provides.

[robg adds: This won't work in absolutely every spot in OS X. In text input boxes in Safari and Camino, for instance, nothing will happen with Control-Delete. But it seems to work most everywhere else.]
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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: MJCube on Dec 17, '07 09:09:27AM
In text input boxes in Safari and Camino, for instance, nothing will happen with Control-Delete.
Not true for me. Where it doesn't work, I get the whole character deleted.

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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: penthang on Dec 18, '07 07:21:32AM

This doesn't seem to seem to work anywhere in firefox, I suspect that it works in programs using coco text frameworks only?



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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: zionthelion73 on Dec 18, '07 11:41:57PM

No way...
just option-n gives your result.
and control-delete in mail is a normal deletee
I have an italian key and layout
I have diacritics on the keyboard as a plain key



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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: TGV on Dec 19, '07 04:50:05AM

It works in e.g. TextEdit, but it can't work in general: if an application does most of its event handling itself, it will have to implement control-delete as well and I'm pretty sure no-one thinks about these things. So I infer that it will work in thos parts of applications that are built on Cocoa elements, such as NSTextField. E.g., it works in Camino's address and search box, but (probably) not in MS Word or OpenOffice.



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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: Lapo on Dec 19, '07 05:43:56AM

It doesn't work in many apps : Finder (renaming a file), TextWrangler, Safari (entering URL)...
So this trick seems to be more an app feature than a global feature.

(French Mac OS X 10.5.1 here)



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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: cprompt on Dec 23, '07 06:24:53AM

It worked in Adium for me. And I'm using Esperanto characters. (ĉ, ĝ, ŝ, ĵ, ĥ, ŭ)



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Delete just the accent from a character
Authored by: bengarland on Dec 19, '07 07:47:28AM

I can imagine this being useful... never.



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