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Having been used to the Compose Key in Linux, I was trying to find out a way to type Portuguese (accented) characters in Windows 8 installed on a Macbook Pro. After reading up about the Dead key and use of AltGr key, I started experimenting with different key combinations. My keyboard layout was set to US (English). While playing around with different keys, I just found out that you could use the left "control" key in almost the same way as you would use the "Compose Key" on Linux. For example,   <Ctrl>` a  gives you,   à  While using the control key, do mind the fact that in many instances, "CTRL"+<some aplhabet> are bound to some default actions, like <CTRL>+o opens a new file, etc. Well, that seems to work well only in the address bar of Chrome. So, next I figured that you can actually use others keys as well instead of just the <Ctrl> key if you change your keyboard layout to US-International Keyboard layout. <Alt> + ...

I was trying to create a directory today inside an existing directory in MinGW32 on Windows 8. When I tried executing the following command, mkdir code\project it just didn't complain about anything, but it did create a directory - not exactly the way I intended it to. It created a directory "codeproject" by simply stripping off the backslash from the command. If you still need to use backslashes only, then you should enclose the path in quotes like, mkdir "code\project" else, you could use forward slashes instead of backslashes.