They aren't smart or soft, they are typographically correct.
On PC I have AutoHotKey bindings for German and English quotes, single and double, and I'm usually using them.
On PC I have AutoHotKey bindings for German and English quotes, single and double, and I'm usually using them.
Most linux desktops are different and more complicated but here is how I set mine up on openbsd.
pick a key that is handy but you don't use much, for me this was the context menu key, on many european keyboards there is an altgr key set aside for this exact use case.
in ~/.xsession add a line like "xmodmap -e 'keysym Menu = Multi_key'"
create a file ~/.XCompose to setup your own compose sequences. mine looks like
#load system compose files
include "%L"
<Multi_key> <w> <e> <b> : "\xf0\x9f\x95\xb8" # spiderweb
According to an ancient convention.
Conventions can be changed. It is not intrinsically, objectively superior to have two separate glyphs for a starting and ending quotation mark. I'd argue the opposite. It is needless complexity. Let us jettison it and embrace the simpler single glyph.