Although my experience with them was limited, I think I can safely state
that typewriters with non-escaping keys, also called dead keys, simply
typed a glyph without letting the carriage move to the position for the
next character.

Ordinary typewriter keys not only type a character, they also trip a
mechanism called an escapement, borrowing a term from horology, because
the mechanism is similar to a clock escapement. (The escapement makes the
ticks you hear in a traditional clock.) In monospacing typewriters, the
escapement simply lets the carriage jump by one letter space. In
proportional spacing typewriters, the carriage jumps by an amount that
depends upon the character being typed.

"Dead" keys have a bump removed from the typebar* (the bar that supports
the type slug). That bump trips the escapement when any ordinary spacing
character is typed. *The typebar is not a key! Your finger touches the key.

As to electronic typewriters, the internal software makes "dead" keys act
the way they do; the printhead doesn't advance as it usually does. (I
don't know whether the diacritic has to be typed first on electronic
typewriters, but that's very likely.) I also assume that IBM Selectric
typewriters (which are not electronic at all) also leave the "golf ball"
in place for "dead" keys, I assume.

For Latin-alphabetic languages, the diacritic on a dead key has to be
typed first, then the letter itself.

Keyboard software can be made to do almost anything you want it to; that
takes a competent programmer.

===

Btw, if any apologies are needed for including a link to something very
political in my signature, I surely apologize. The USA is in a rare and
severe crisis, but there's no need to impose that on Qalam.

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
who was once a Flexowriter technician
Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2