Ubuntu :: Creating ^__^ -smiley Effectively ?

Just like many other posts begin, I'll begin by mentioning that I have no idea where exactly my question would fit in. Apologies if there is another place this should be in. And then to my silly tiny tweak question.

Being the kind of japanified nerd I am, I often use the "^__^" smileys and "~" as I chat around with my friends. Which is 90% of what I do all the time. And after using many distros in the past, I've always been annoyed how I must press the "^" key twice to print one of them. As in windows I can press ^ and then the next key, _

This makes me a succesful ^__^ face very effectively.

Same goes for the ~ key, which is not such a problem however, as I'll press space after it most of the time. Sometimes I want to put many ~ beind a sentence or stupid word, to make it very...nice. This is very annoying cause I have to press ~ key twice every time, when in windows I can press it twice and I get two. Or once, and then the spacebar, which sill come out as ~ and a space.

Now, yes, this is all sounds extremely stupid and small detail, and I believe many will think I can't be serious - but for someone this detail is somewhat important, and has always annoyed me in every linux distro I have used. I have no idea how to search for something like this, and I don't expect anyone to reply, nor do I expect anyone to really know how to change this. Currently I am running Xubuntu on my laptop most of the time. And I use it for instant messaging etc. - thus using these smileys would be very fundamenta.