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I have been trying to install the United States International keyboard layout for Windows to be able to easily type accented vowels for Spanish but there was literally no guide anywhere for Windows 10 and above, and the way to add keyboard layouts is a bit hidden now.
Press Windows key, type Language Settings and hit enter, in the Preferred Languages section click on the language you want to use this layout for (probably English (United States)), and then a secret hidden menu pops up (can you tell I hate UI design like this?) that has an Options button, so click that. Now you should be on a page called Language options: English (United States). Towards the bottom there is a Keyboards section, and under that there should be a Add a keyboard button, so click that. A drop-down list should appear and scroll and select United States-International.
Hope this is helpful.
I ran into a somewhat similar problem with the US-International layout. I am using it to type some non-ASCII characters that are available through AltGr combinations (such as ö and ä) but want to keep the default behaviour of other keys, in particular the ' and " keys.
I made a GitHub repository holding a layout that does that. The layout file (direct link) can be opened in Microsoft's Keyboard Layout Creator tool (free as in beer), and built with it. Running the resulting installer adds the new layout to Windows where it can be used exactly like the builtin layouts.
Best working solution to me. But not 100% what the OP wanted as it doesn't eliminate dead key.
Simply pressing SPACE after any of the dead keys puts only the wanted symbol; no extra space. 'SPACEE puts the wanted 'e in contrary to 'E putting é.
There's no need to fiddle around with configuring anything extra or always having to switch your input with WIN+SPACE. It also should work for any other language's keyboard. Once I got used to this I didn't feel like I needed another solution for that.
Hello!
Frankly I've been loving US international as I live in France and need to use accents quite often, however something drives me totally mad, the apostrophe character aka ' and also double apostrophe aka " has to be pressed, and then you have to hit spacebar.
This is made to allow the choice to either keep pressing ' and then press e while you're pressing ' to form an é, or press ' and release it and then after press e which will also result in a é.
Is it possible to disable the second behavior so you only have the keep pressing option, maybe have the ' key only register as a key release as a workaround to allow for typing é without typing 'é.
I pray for a solution to this haha.
You can make the Alt/Option level of Apple's US International PC behave like the version you are used to by creating a custom keyboard layout with the app Ukelele.
For reference the Alt/Option behavior of Windows US International is here.
Note that on a Mac both left and right alt/option keys normally do the same thing, i.e. create special characters.
PS If in fact your right alt key does not produce any characters at all, then something is broken with your keyboard or software.
An experimental keyboard that tries to conform to the Windows version can be found here.
Note: If you want something like one of the Linux versions of "US International" which have a dozen or more dead keys for making a huge number of diacritic and other characters, then the Apple equivalent is ABC Extended, whose layout is however quite different. For that see this earlier question.
The closest you'll find on macOS is the English - Irish layout for áéíóú, you don't need to type alt+e+a for á, just alt+a. If you want to match US_intl character by character, you'll need to create your own .keylayout with Ukelele and drop it under /Library/Keyboard Layouts.