I needed to write a few things in Portuguese and have never had to type accented characters on Linux before.

Since this was kind of a pain to figure out and I will likely forget how to do this, I wrote down the steps.

Here’s how I set this up in Ubuntu 20.04.

1. Install gnome-tweaks: apt install gnome-tweaks
2. Run gnome-tweaks from a terminal.
3. Set a “Compose Key”. I set mine to the right Alt key.
4. Compose + letter + [ ‘ ” ` ~ , ] will type the accented character. For example to type a