Linux: more levels of cool

Today at lunch I was playing with getting accents working in Ubuntu. I went to the obvious place and lo and behold there it was. I wanted to have the ' key used as an accent key instead of, say, a compose key or a completely different layout. The nomenclature that they used was a bit different (they call it a dead key), but sure enough it all three ways of doing accents, were there. One thing that Gnome was missing, however, is a button to put the current keyboard layout in panel for you. Help, didn't help much (although it did mention the Keyboard Layout Changer) and after some googling I found out that you can as Gnome to insert an Applet and one of the default applets is a keyboard layout changer. Here are some problems:
  • My two keyboard layouts are USA and USA with dead keys (or some such), but the status just shows USA for both of them, and there's no easy way that I could see to change the text. If I hover the mouse over the text it tells me the full name, however.
  • I haven't been able to figure out how to change the layout using a key combination, like in Windows. It's become pretty automatic in Windows for me and I'd like to be able to use the same key combination.
  • To change the layout I have to go through a two level window, should be a little bit easier, I would think.
But what's really cool is that you can configure it so that only one application is affected (love it!). I hate when I go back to programming and the ' key is now a dead key now just my Instant Mesenger or e-mail has the Portuguese keyboard and everything else has the US keyboard, this is the way life is supposed to be...

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