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Comment by stjohnswarts | Hacker News Reader

Because most of us will have to go on the hunt to find the keystrokes to get the symbol.

I took the liberty to read a couple of your previous HN threads, and from context there's a chance you're living in US and you are an English native speaker.

Forgive me if the above is incorrect, but in case it is:

The majority of your world's fellow humans, wishing to be comp developers, already spent months or years (combined) of their individual lives in order to learn English as non-native-speakers to do just that.

Your "whining" (yes, it's intended to be somewhat impolite, but I don't think it's unreasonable given the above) that, in case Ć becomes the next-gen well-known programming tool, you'll have to spend maybe a couple of hours to update your keyboard mapping or learn some other way of quickly typping 'Ć' invokes 0 of my (and many others') empathy. Though many were helpful to suggest you how to do that quickly/correctly.

I hope my words will be deemed as 'fair enough given the context' :)

I highly recommend using a compose key to enter special characters. I think it's more common by default on Linux, but I use WinCompose. I've never entered "ć" in my life, but hitting ALT, apostrophe then c, it worked.

Just store it in your brain as "cito" and google will do the rest, e.g. google "cito programing language" or "cito GitHub"

Back in the day you could enter these with alt-... numpad keystrokes. Decimal ASCII representation maybe? Might still work in some situations?

Yep, still works. Also does four digits iirc. For extended unicode.

Right-Ctrl C ' if you have a compose key (built in on Linux, WinCompose[1] for Windows, no clue for Mac).

[1] https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

On Mac, hold down the "c" key and a little menu with accented versions (ç, ć, č) appears, with numbers to choose which one. The flip side is that holding down letters or numbers doesn't repeat them on a Mac.

The (Neo)Vim digraph is `C'`: Ctrl+k, Shift+c, '

My old mac muscle memory is telling me option+e, c.

I don't have one anymore to test though, but I used to use the mac layout on Linux for a while exactly for composing using alt.

Hmm, I get ´c when doing option-e c. I feel like it should work to combine the two, but ... Looks like that functionality only applies to the vowels (and not y): á´b´c´dé´f´g´hí´j´k´l´m´nó´p´q´r´s´tú´v´w´x´y´z.

I'm not seeing that behavior; my letter/number keys simply repeat. But I'm sure I've seen it before. I guess there may be an option somewhere to enable/disable it, but offhand I can't seem to find it.

Or maybe this has changed (back) in a recent OS update? I'm running 12.0beta on this machine.

It's been around since Lion or Mountain Lion, IIRC. There's a toggle in keyboard settings to choose between repeating or hold-for-alternate behavior (like how iOS works). The substitution behavior is the default, but if you already had repeat mode on it may have carried forward. The old way was option+e and a vowel for an accute accent mark, but I don't think that works with consonants.

Yes, I expected a toggle in the keyboard settings, but I can't seem to find one on Monterey. (What exactly is it labeled, and where located? Maybe I'm just being blind...)

The dead-keys like Opt-E for acute only work with a small set of letters in the standard US keyboard layout, although it's possible for a different layout to support more -- subject to the combinations existing as precomposed characters in Unicode. (For other combinations, you'd need to enter a combining accent after the letter, and rely on the font to supports placing it properly.)

That gives me a Ç

edit: Looks like it's supposed to work, I don't know what I'm doing wrong: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable

what do you get using comma?

The same thing, ç

edit: hold on, that's only in Firefox. Anywhere else, comma+c does ç and apostrophe+c does ć

Are you in en_US? The sequence you mentioned should definitely work in that locale. Here’s a more authoritative link than the manually-updated wiki page: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/blob/master...

If you’re not in en_US you can find other locales and their Compose sequences in the nls directory.

Most of who? Most people in the world are not native english speakers.

In biology, it’s Latin. In computing, it’s English. Fellow ESLers, let’s just get over it.

Not exactly. {, }, [, ], (, ) are not part of the English alphabet but they are widely used. Same thing for ->, =>, !=. But things like λ are not used at all. So the alphabet of computing is ASCII.

> {, }, [, ], (, ) are not part of the English alphabet but they are widely used. Same thing for ->, =>, !=. But things like λ are not used at all.

Yet your sentence, clearly written in English, contains all these characters.

English also contains many accented words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

You are supposed to be able to type them if you write in English. Also, if you are in polite company, it's alright to drop the occasional Greek word. So here we are: if you can fully write in English, you can use all these characters.

Ascii-only is the modern equivalent of all-caps. Something archaic, still used by old people with hopelessly limited input devices.

Mac and iOS: hold C down, push Ć.

Have you tried the APL keyboard?

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