Have you tried altgr-intl layout? us-altgr-intl is a variety that exposes accented characters through AltGr-combinations. I have to type in Scandinavian, Germanic, French and Latin languages and they're all covered. As a bonus it's consistent between platforms, included by default on all distros I know of, and except the Altgr-combinations it's just like the vanilla layout.

If you're on X11 you can try out the en-us variant by

  setxkbmap -layout "us" -variant altgr-intl

It’s a good step, yes! A life saver if you often need to type accented letters or weird letters. What bugs me is the difference between Alt and AltGr, which is very annoying. Alt is much better located for this.

You will inevitably need dedicated keys (e.g. use the numbers row for this, keypad for numbers) for accented characters if you use type in an accented language actively.

For cases when you just want an accent occasionally compose key is great.

The Mac way (long-press, select) looks cool but it hardly is convenient to press and wait seconds for every accent if it's there in almost every word.

Ah, I meant the older Mac way, which is similar to some Linux approaches. Option+[key], then the character you're trying to modify.

This exists on linux (PopOS). I think it’s called compose key under GNOME settings.

not true, had this for decade, never grew on me bc it's just unintuitive. US International keymap on demand on Windows is far superior

Same, I was hoping this did that but judging by your comment I guess it doesn't

Out of scope for Kinto - although this topic has been brought up a number of times in the issue tickets and I did do some early research into the topic. I found at least 1 or 2 existing projects out there that could be a nice jumping off point to create something along these lines - but it isn't something I have the bandwidth to work on or include with Kinto.

I think it's a possible thing to do however from what I have seen for anyone that wants to put in the effort.