I thought I'd switch to zsh, so I did just that with chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh user, unfortunately, it broke my compose key (unresponsive both in the console and in an X terminal); also, when I read email in emacs rmail, Swedish characters are not displayed correctly (diamonds in the console, question marks in an X terminal) - but it is possible to display them, for example if I cat the mail files instead.To possibly reinitialize the compose key, I run setupcon again as superuser but it didn't help. In /etc/default/keyboard, this line is present XKBOPTIONS=compose:lwin,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp.As for the compose key in X, and the character set in both the console and an X terminal, I'm clueless because I can't remember anytime setting up those things, they just worked.To double check, I switched back to bash with chsh -s /bin/bash user, and everything worked as before. I examined .profile and .bashrc to see if I possibly had done some keyboard/charmap initialization there, but I couldn't find anything to that extent.zsh --versionzsh 4.3.17 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
zsh broke compose key and special chars
zsh;locale;keyboard layout
Since bash or zsh is in no way responsible for handling the Compose key, what must have broken is your session startup files. Check your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile, or /etc/profile, for commands that might have a bearing on the locale setting, such as values for the LANG or LC_CTYPE environment variables. It's likely that your keyboard configuration no longer matches your application's idea of the system character set.You can make zsh read your .profile by putting the following command in your ~/.zprofile:emulate -R sh -c '. ~/.profile'If that doesn't suffice (especially under X), tell us what distribution (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, ), what desktop environment (or window manager, e.g. KDE4, Gnome2, XFCE4, ) and what display manager (the GUI program where you enter your user name and password, e.g. GDM, KDM, Lightdm, ) you use.