Is there a 'é' shortcut?

do option+e then hit e

btw option is the ⌥ key

I see that your questioned has already been answered, but I thought you might find this additional info also helpful. If you open "System Preferences", click on the "International" icon, then click the "Input Menu" tab, in the resulting list, you can put a check in the box next to "Keyboard Viewer". This will place an icon on your menu bar that's looks like a flag (of the country whose language is the default localized language used on your computer--e.g. American flag if using U.S. English). Now click on the flag and choose "Show Keyboard Viewer". Now, when you click on either the fn, ctrl, alt/option, apple/clover leaf key, the viewer will show what will be typed if you click any other key in combination with that key. If you see an orange square on a key, this means that key will need to be clicked twice to produce the desired character (for example option + e will produce the accent above the e, but then you must release the option key and press e again, and now the combo of accent and e will be typed). Hope this all makes sense 🙂

P.S. Oops, I see um already beat me to the punch--I think I got a bit too wordy :-/

Message was edited by: darkbodhi

after years i'm still finding these things myself

btw if you go into keyboard viewer and hit ⌥ it shows you all the available ⌥+ combinations to generate grave, circumflex etc.

use system prefs->international->input menu and turn on the keyboard viewer, and enable input menu in the menu bar, then you can can call it up from the menu bar, i also turn on the character palette which is handy for finding the really obscure characters

See Tom Gewecke's "Unleash Your Multilingual Mac" page
http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html
for anything you might want to know on the subject. Tom also hangs out here answering questions a lot.

To darkbodhi

You are a genius! One of my children has the â symbol in their name and until I read your post I had searched fruitlessly for a shortcut for this for over a year. Many thanks. Strawbs