I do have my compose key setup so that typing an é can be a matter of pressing + e + ' but é seems to come up enough with French that having an even easier way to type it would be handy. So, I did what I have shown below. Now I can type an é by pressing + e + e (one after another). It is the same amount of keystrokes, but considerably easier. After adding the following content to the following files I needed to log out and back in again. ~/.XCompose

include "%L"   # import the default Compose file for your locale
<Multi_key> <e> <e>     : "é"

~/.profile

export GTK_IM_MODULE="xim"