Hi Daniel,

quoted text
> I'm running -current. I have an US keyboard but need the dead keys, 
> since my native language have accents and other local punctuation.

I've always used American keyboards without dead keys so I can't really
help here. But an alternative is to set up a compose key, e.g., with

$ setxkbmap -option compose:ralt

to make it right alt. Then you can press (in sequence) Alt ' e to get
an e with acute accent, etc. This is configurable as well; you can set
up a file in ~/.XCompose if you want to change the default bindings.

Note that it uses Latin1 only by default, but you can get full access
to Unicode with LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 set.

--
Anthony J. Bentley