Hacker News Reader

I use Ctrl+Alt as a substitute for Alt Gr making it feel as natural as typing any other shift-bound special character on the right side of keyboard

It's standard on windows but I have to resort to a hacky solution to make it work on linux unfortunately (still don't have a nice way of doing it cleanly so suggestions are welcome, currently it's an autokey script where e.g. ctrl+alt+0 prints '}', which isn't elegant, doesn't work in wayland etc)

View on HN

I use autokey not as a hotkey but as text expansion. If I type "..c" then this is expanded into "{}" with the cursor inside the braces. And to surround text with "{}" I use ",,c", hence "whatever,,c" becomes "{whatever}". I have similar text expansion for other symbols that require AltGr, square braces are ..s and ,,s for instance. On Windows Autohotkey can do the same, just the scripting language is different. The Autokey text for curly braces is simply "{}<left>" and for surrounding with curly braces the script is: import time keyboard.send_keys("<shift>+<ctrl>+<left>") time.sleep(0.25) sample = clipboard.get_selection() keyboard.send_key("<delete>") keyboard.send_keys("{%s}" % sample) Maybe it helps you.

That is actually very smart and helpful, thanks! :) My only gripe with autokey is that it's the only thing holding me back from wayland. Hawck is supposed to work with wayland but I never got it to work, was a while ago I tried though

https://github.com/snyball/Hawck

I don't use Wayland, but it seems xdg-desktop-portal since 1.16.0 has a 'Global Shortcuts portal'. Perhaps check it out.

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal

Reply on news.ycombinator.com