What's an easy way to type accented characters on a laptop with no NumLock/Numpad?

It seems bizarre to me that within a few years of them becoming a "thing" Windows has given us ⊞ Win+. to launch an emoji window. Yet computers have been around for 60+ years and there's still (as far as I can make out) no easy way to type them on an English keyboard.

I can't do alt-codes, as I have no NumPad or NumLock key.

I've learnt today that in Word you can type (for example) Ctrl+' followed by a to give you á. There's plenty of other variations, but you'd never remember them all. And it only seems to work in Word, not Excel, notepad, Chrome, etc.

Why isn't there just ⊞ Win+/ or similar to pop up a modern filterable character map (type a and it shows all the a variants, etc)

I'm hoping someone knows of a way to achieve something along these lines. Character map or copy and pasting from Google/Wikipedia (e.g. "a accent") is my go-to at the moment, and it's pretty tedious.

Win+. does actually support selecting characters such as á, î and ñ.

First, press the Ω button to access the symbols.

Now, at the bottom, there is a list of sub pages that have different symbol collections. Press the Ç button which should be the 4th. Now you can insert the default á... etc

You cannot search for a letter, but you can press the first icon to get all the recent ones you used. If you only use a subset, this will be your go-to tab.

I do this by changing my default keyboard to the US-International layout. This converts some of the punctuation keys to "dead keys" that double as accents, so that by typing the "dead key" followed by the character to apply the accent to, you get the accented character. (For example, to get á, I type ' (the regular apostrophe becomes a "dead key" for acute accent) followed by a. To use a "dead key" for its original purpose, type the "dead key" followed by a space (e.g., to get ', type ' followed by space).

Another possibility would allow you to choose the specific shortcuts, but you'd have to be willing to get into coding with AutoHotKey. I've done this, too, for characters that I need (for Esperanto) that aren't available even from the US-International keyboard.

(Below is my AHK script for the Esperanto characters)

#Hotstring ? C * 

::^c::ĉ
::^C::Ĉ
::^g::ĝ
::^G::Ĝ
::^h::ĥ
::^H::Ĥ
::^j::ĵ
::^J::Ĵ
::^s::ŝ
::^S::Ŝ
::~u::ŭ
::~U::Ŭ

(I actually use both AHK and the US-International keyboard together.)