It'd be nice if there were a global way to set this up, but between doubting it's possible and spending so much time in KDE that it wouldn't much matter I care very little in either direction.

I want to set it up so that I can type special characters the way OSX will. Y'know [Option]+[Shift]+[=] is ± type thing. I don't honestly care if it's the same combinations as OSX since I only have the one I mentioned memorised. It's just really annoying when I need to type things that aren't on a US std keyboard and have to wait for charmap to load.

If this has been discussed before, or is explained in a how-to that I can install through apt, I apologise. I honestly don't know what doing that is called to do any searching.

You probably want what's called a `compose key'.

What the compose key does is this: you press and release it. Then you press two keys, and it "counts as" their "most logical combination". Example: <compose>, Y and = generates the yen sign (¥). <compose>, + and - generates plus-minus (±). <compose>, a and ' generates a with an accent (á). Experiment, and see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key (and also the lists of combinations it links to).

The general thumbrules are these:

• the order doesn't matter: o" and "o both generate ö.
• accents: pressing a vowel and one of `'"^~ generally produces an accented wovel (or n~ => ñ).
• repeats: composing two identical character often produces an alternative version-- !! => ¡ (upside-down !), __ => ¯ (overbar), xx => × (cross product).
• ^ raises: 1^ => ¹ (1 raised), 0^ => ° (the degree symbol), .^ => · (dot product).
• painting: consider how you would draw the symbol, and approximate that. co => © (copyright symbol), -, => ¬ (logical negation).

If you can set this up with kcontrol, it's probably under keyboard layout options. You can also use

This will make shift-shift the compose key. If you want something different, consult the xmodmap manual. It's a not entirely non-trivial task to build a good mental model of how xmodmap works, so feel free to ask here (or, if you can find an irc channel to ask in you can get real-time answers).

Hope this helps.

A great deal yes. I've of course seen the compose key setting options... hard to miss them if you have to do anything shy of standard pc104 layout, but I never understood how it worked. I misunderstood the only thing I ever saw referring to how it was actually used to think it was like in DOS when you hold left_Alt+<0 - 254> on NumPad gave you any given part of the 255 ASCII chars. I did actually mannage to get it to give me an ß, but not much else.

Thanks!