How on earth are you supposed to make those characters in vi, anyways?!?

Using vim in any operating system, you can generate those special charachers with the so called "digraphs":

CTRL-K <<
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CTRL-K >>
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For an explanation, and for more strange characters, look at vim's help

:h :digraphs
:h digraph-table
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You know, we speakers of exotic languages (with strange characters such as accented vowels) need to learn those tricks. :-)

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