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I have a Windows machine were I am using X11 forwarding over SSH to a local Debian 13 (Openbox) machine. It is working fine but in any application I cannot press the characters " (double quotes) or ' (single quotes).

When pressing double quotes " nothing happens then a second press I get:

¨ DIAERESIS (U+00A8) when I expect " QUOTATION MARK (U+0022) for single quotes I similar behavior but with the ´ ACUTE ACCENT (U+00B4) character

I get the same behavior in geany and thunar over X11 forwarding. I have tested the keyboard directly in the machine and hooked up a monitor to the Debian machine and these keys work fine.

These characters works fine over the terminal.

I have tested multiple clients: MobaXterm and PuTTY with vcxsrv and get the same results, which makes me think this is something Debian/Linux side rather than Windows.

Is there a reason why this is happening, is there a fix for this?

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  • Do you have another Linux PC you can try to ssh -X from as client, to fully eliminate the Windows side? Or failing a separate Linux PC, possible you could boot from a Linux live image on your Windows PC for a test. Commented 2 days ago

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You're probably using a keyboard layout with dead keys which are used to type diacritics, the first key press is "dead" which means nothing will be shown, but the key will modify the character on the second key press, for example ^+e → ê. It has nothing to do with X11 or Windows. The " and ' dead keys are used to type umlaut and acute accent respectively, similar to how ` is used for the grave accent

To solve this you have 2 ways

  • Change to keyboard layout to one that doesn't use dead keys. For example from US International to US

  • Or type space after the dead key if you have to use that layout. "+Space → ", and '+Space → '

    When you press the dead keys twice many systems will interpret as "the user wants the accent mark itself" and give you ¨ or ´.

See also https://kbdlayout.info/features/deadkeys

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    I was already on the correct keyboard layout, but changed to a different one then changed back and it is working now, thanks for the help. I never knew about dead keys this is good info. Commented yesterday

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