Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

Good riddance! But we've yet to see what they come up with as a replacement. Besides, I'm not sure a different keyboard will help with people laziness and spelling deficiencies.

Personally, I'm perfectly fine with my qwerty keyboard, and it doesn't prevent me from typing specific French letters "é, è, ç, à, É ...". It's actually very easy to type these letters on a mac keyboard. Apple did a good job on this.

"option - e e = é" "option ` - a = à"... I don't know how to type "oeuf" or "oeil" though.

View on HN

I use emacs for input. My browser is xombrero, and with ctrl + i, I can switch to emacs for editing current input. There, I've created an input method with postfix maps, which allows me to input most european languages plus turkish. If I wanted to type « liberté, égalité, fraternité », I'd type:

  liberte/, e/galite/, fraternite/

Very easy, and invaluably useful. And I can switch to other input methods like greek, hebrew and arabic, etc.

Cool, would you mind sharing your set up?

XCompose would also work for this.

In emacs, I use the Typo package, plus this quail set up:

  (require 'quail)
  ;;; Unified latin input method:
  (quail-define-package
   "unilat-gk" "Universal Latin (GK)" "" nil
   "A universal Latin input method.
  Defines key combos for inputting Turkish, Italian, French,
  Portuguese, Spanish, German, Latin, and Nordic Germanics.")
  
  (eval
   `(quail-define-rules
     ;; Turkish I and umlauts, cedillas circumflecis
     ("i"  ?i) ("i;" ?ı) ("o;" ?ö) ("u;" ?ü) ("c;" ?ç) ("g;" ?ğ) ("s;" ?ş)
  
     ("I;" ?İ) ("O;" ?Ö) ("U;" ?Ü) ("C;" ?Ç) ("G;" ?Ğ) ("S;" ?Ş) ("A^" ?Â)
     ("E^" ?Ê) ("U^" ?Û) ("I^" ?Î) ("O^" ?Ô)
  
     ("a^" ?â) ("e^" ?ê) ("i^" ?î) ("u^" ?û) ("o^" ?ô)
  
     ;; Acute and breve
     ("a\\" ?à) ("e\\" ?è) ("i\\" ?ì) ("o\\" ?ò) ("u\\" ?ù)
  
     ("A\\" ?À) ("E\\" ?È) ("I\\" ?Ì) ("O\\" ?Ò) ("U\\" ?Ù)
  
     ("a/" ?á) ("e/" ?é) ("i/" ?í) ("o/" ?ó) ("u/" ?ú)
  
     ("A/" ?Á) ("E/" ?É) ("I/" ?Í) ("O/" ?Ó) ("U/" ?Ú)
  
     ;; Macron
     ("a_" ?ā) ("e_" ?ē) ("i_" ?ī) ("o_" ?ō) ("u_" ?ū)
  
     ("A_" ?Ā) ("E_" ?Ē) ("I_" ?Ī) ("O_" ?Ō) ("U_" ?Ū)
  
     ;; Tilde
     ("a~" ?ã) ("e~" ?ẽ) ("i~" ?ĩ) ("o~" ?õ) ("u~" ?ũ) ("n~" ?ñ)
  
     ("A~" ?Ã) ("E~" ?Ẽ) ("I~" ?Ĩ) ("O~" ?Õ) ("U~" ?Ũ) ("N~" ?Ñ)
  
     ;; Ordinal
     ("a&" ?ª) ("o&" ?º)
  
     ;; Various
     ("I:" ?Ï) ("i:" ?ï) ("a:" ?ä) ("A:" ?Ä) ("e:" ?ë) ("E:" ?Ë) ("a0" ?å)
     ("A0" ?Å) ("o$" ?ø) ("O$" ?Ø) ("sZ" ?ß) ("o£" ?œ) ("O£" ?Œ) ("a£" ?æ)
     ("A£" ?Æ)
  
     ;; Escaping.
     ,@(mapcar
        (lambda (letter)
          (list (format "%c#" letter) letter))
        (string-to-list "aeiouAEIOUscgnSCGN"))))

The last pair of toplevels have to be evaluated one after another, ‘quail-define-rules’ modifies the last created quail package. Stupid, but what can one do…

I use the ‘#’ character to escape the combination, i.e. a# inserts a literally. Otherwise I'd have to use C-g to interrupt a combination, which doesn't work well with macroes, i.e. stops the recording.

I use a British Q keyboard, so I need this too:

  (add-to-list 'quail-keyboard-layout-alist
               `("gb" . ,(concat "                              "
                                 "  1!2\"3£4$5%6^7&8*9(0)-_=+    "
                                 "  qQwWeErRtTyYuUiIoOpP[{]}    "
                                 "  aAsSdDfFgGhHjJkKlL;:'@#~    "
                                 "  \\|zZxXcCvVbBnNmM,<.>/?      "
                                 "                              ")))
  
  (quail-set-keyboard-layout "gb")

And in ‘~/.xombrero.conf’:

  external_editor = emacsclient <file>

When I hit C-i in any input field, a buffer with name like ‘xombreroALP5BY’ pops up in my already running emacs instance, then I edit, and hit ‘C-x #’ to send text to xombrero (technically not so, but works like that).

Hope I didn't skip anything, if it doesn't work, please tell.

The US-International layout exists for ages, and allows for composable letters. "áéíóúçãñàâô..." is as simple as getting the accent + letter.

I fail to understand why the Brazilian Standardization bodies decided that we needed to get a keyboard with an exclusive letter for "ç" and yet forces composition of everything else.

This causes excruciating pain when coding, as you can't type a single ', ", or ~ without an obligatory space after it.

Instead, I usually install the "Pseudo VT320" keyboard layout from here: http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ , which makes the AltGr key act like the Compose key on a Unix keyboard.

The Mac keyboard is also bearable.

"excruciating pain" is a bit of hyperbole, don't you think?

Quote keys are still in the home row, it is just a matter of muscle memory to get used to "right pinky at home row, thumb at space bar" to get quotes going.

But I am an emacs user, so maybe I just got used to the composability.

> hyperbole

Yeah, and also I guess I shouldn't joke with that. Sorry.

Thanks for sharing - will try it out!

After learning touch type on German (QWERTZ) and then on French keyboard (AZERTY) - I finally found a solution by switching to the US International with AltGr Dead Keys (Combinator key) - which is easy on Linux. However on Windows I felt exactly the same pain as you - luckily I have to work only rarely on Windows. Until now I used for Windows [1].

However I do not understand how Microsoft missed to ship such Keyboard layout with Windows.

Now I can write French, German and Turkish on the same keyboard. And when I have to work abroad, even in Russia, the US International layout is everywhere (most of the times reachable just with Alt-Shift on Windows).

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/usialtgr/

The compose key on linux also works really well:

Compose e' = é Compose oe = œ Compose a^ = â Compose e" = ë

I'm not against Azerty but we still can't type « or » with it and since it's part of the language, it definitely should be there.

That's the advantage of the compose key: compose + < + < = « (and the opposite for »).

Oh yeah sure, it's a solution for the current keyboard but I believe a key should already exist for it since it's a common symbol in the language. It would be the equivalent of having to do altgr+S for the dollar symbol in the US.

OS X 10.11 brought the iOS-inspired letter selection, which makes discoverability a bit better, I guess. but as someone who never needs to type those I can't tell if its efficient or not. to type æ you do a long press on a, and either mouse over or push the number beneath the letter. That seems 100x more complicated than typing a normal key, but at least there is no guessing.

In spanish we also have lots of accents, plus the ñ, and the ç if you write catalan - plus, we open questions and exclamations with ¿ and ¡. I have a generic american layout in my laptop and it's not a problem at all.

Regarding the œ, shouldn't that be a ligature, handled by the font system? Although it should be language-dependant....

Careful. Wars have been fought over this. The letter 'æ' in danish is a proper letter of the alphabet (in the 27th position) whereas the same symbol in French represents 'a' and 'e' joined together. Much fun.

Up until very recently, ch and ll were proper spanish letters, so when looking up on the dictionary, you would find chancla in a separate chapter, after cordón (ch would come after c in the alphabet). Same with llama and loro (ll being after l). They nowadays maintain their own phoneme but have been demoted to irregular pronunciation, from letter without proper symbol.

Unless it's disabled, on recent versions of OS X and iOS, you can also hold down the letter to get a pop-up of variations. Holding down "e" shows me ėęēêèéë variations. At least, on my US English locale, it does.

good riddance indeed!

what sucks about AZERTY too is that very common strokes require modifiers

- the `.` (point) requires a shift key! - for `@` you need "alt gr" - top-row numbers need a shift. especially annoying if the keyboard does not have a number pad

ugh..

option - q will get you œ, but at least in informal settings, typing "oe" is acceptable, I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com