If you type in a language that requires accents (such as Spanish), OS X provides a quick way to produce them and delete them without changing your keyboard layout. To manufacture an accent, hold Option soon after press E, and you will see the accent character. soon after press any other key, such as A, E, I, O, or U, and it will place that character beneath the accent. You can plus manufacture other characters such as ñ with Option-N soon after N or ç with Option-C. But most of you probably knew that

whether you want to delete the accents easily, however, OS X provides a very useful shortcut: Control-Delete. Try typing an accented character and soon after using Control-Delete instead of just plain Delete. When you do, OS X will convert the accented character into a normal character. I do not know whether that works for other characters other than the ones I know from Spanish and Portuguese, but I do know that it works in 10.4 and 10.5.

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Original post by Michael Rose