In Windows when you compose keys (you have an interational keyboard layout), then when you press the second key, and it cannot be composed, you get separate characters.
I.e. type ^ and then a, you get â, but type ^ and then z, you get ^z.
On Linux this may not be the case.
If the first character is one that can be combined to compose, and you need it "un-composed", you need to press space after it.
At least that's how my Fedora/KDE does it, and like my old Suse/KDE did.
Since I hardly need diacritics when programming I wrote a little shell script to swicth between using standard US and US-international keyboard.
#!/bin/bash
function usage {
echo usage: $0 on\|off
exit 1
}
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
usage
fi
opt=$1
if [ "$opt" = "on" ]; then
echo setting -variant intl for X keyboard
setxkbmap -variant intl
elif [ "$opt" = "off" ]; then
echo turning off -variant intl for X keyboard
setxkbmap -variant ""
else usage
fi
This was way back in Suse 10.0.
Not sure if this would still work.
Bart