A lot of countries have their own keyboard layouts for special characters and accents.
France for example has the AZERTY layout… certainly one of the worst of all with an accent acting as a dead key (^¨) and some other times with hardkeyed letters with accents (éèàç and even the ù which exists in one and only ONE word in French).
This is not logical and very badly thought out, as well as a complete waste of space.
Azerty is very bad all around, and one way to fix it… is to switch to Qwerty!
Thanks to the US international layout, to do an accented character you have to press the accent key then the letter to combine them. You then can do all type of combination with only one key éáíúóýẃŕṕ. It’s a good system but I prefer to have directly access to the character written on the keyboard and have to press a modifier to access the accent. I use more often the apostrophe ‘ than the accute accent ’ for example, especially when coding.
It’s usually possible on all major OS but not out of the box on Windows where you need Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 2 to customize your own personal keyboard layout.
Here is mine, as you can see you have to press the right Alt key + one of the accent, then the letter you want. The rest of the layout is a classic Qwerty. Feel free to add whatever you want/need.
If you have troubles loading my template in the software, make sure to save the file with Windows breaklines. Otherwise you can also directly download the installer.