Disable special characters such as Tilde (German keyboard) I am using my Mac to write Java code in Eclipse. Not frequently, but commonly enough I need special characters such as ^, ~ or `.
The problem with these is that I have to press the key(-combination) followed by a space in order to insert the character, since these keys are used to create special characters such as ã or è. However, this is really impractical since I can't use them in Java anyway.

Is there a way to disable this feature globally on OS X Yosemite (german keyboard layout)?
You just need to change input source. Probably you have U.S. International, just change it U.S. and this ugly feature will disappear.