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Comment by orphea | Hacker News Reader

If you type "a", combine it with "´", then change your mind and hit backspace, you probably want to end up with "a" even through "á" was a thing "visually displayed as a single unit".

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As a European, no I don't. á isn't used in my language, but my layout offers it via a dead-key-then-base-letter mechanism, and it is correctly treated as one unit when pressing backspace, anything else would feel incorrect. It would be even worse if such a thing happened for the letters that my layout offers individual buttons for (ÅÄÖ). Some languages do treat these as letters with attached modifiers, but many, including mine, treat them as indivisible letters that just happen to look similar to some others for historical reasons, and to treat them as combinations of base letters and diacritics would be completely incorrect, even if you typed them in using the dead-key-then-base-letter mechanism for some reason.

Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to.

Where some layouts may require this method for some characters, another keyboard layout may have the same character on a dedicated key.

The program receives the combined character as one unit, and does not need to be aware of different keyboard layouts.

> Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to.

Which ones? At least the French and German ones don’t work like that: there is no composing, just separate keys for all the characters with diacritics that appear in the language.

Which French layout would that be? I've never seen a French keyboard where this is true. French is my native language. On layouts I'm familiar with, some accented letters have separate keys like é, but not all, the others are made by composing an accent key with a letter.

You're right, sorry. I had forgotten about the ^ and ¨ keys.

Slovak or Czech for example.

On the German Layout the backtick (next to the 1 key) is a dead key.

Whichbis the thing that finally pushed me over the edge and switch to the US layout. backticks are something I use all the time.

Danish keyboards also require you to press '¨' first and then 'o' to produce 'ö'.

Do the danes not have the mechanism that is found on Finnish keyboard layouts, where pressing AltGr+Ö yields Ø and AltGr+Ä yields Æ, except in reverse?

Those mappings are not universal. They are present under Linux but not on MS-Windows. I don't know about Mac, but the layout has in the past been slightly different there from Windows also.

Interesting, it's been like a decade since I last used windows, but I had to go and check what layouts are available, since I remember having these combinations on my layout. Apparently those combinations are provided by windows in the "Finnish and Sami" layout, which provides a number of extra letters (not just ones used by the Sami languages) through AltGr+letter combinations. I must have selected that as my layout at some point while I was still using windows, possibly for the purpose of getting easier access to letters like ÆØÕ, and just forgotten it after some time.

They are there on mac too, use option-Ä to get the Æ or the other way around. What's more, it has worked like that since system 7.x times or so, it's just a good idea.

For me that doesn't work on Windows. Those key combinations doesn't seem to do anything.

I had to change settings on Windows to get access to a mode. I could then enable that mode to be able to readily type Spanish correctly. The mode uses the key combinations as described.

But do you really use ö much over ø?

No, but I do once in a while (very rarely) write a little in german that might use that character.

Nitpicking but most french keyboards have both ready-made keys for "é" and the few other commonly use keys and composing: hitting either '¨' or '^'. For example hitting '¨' then 'e' produces "ë".

You are right, thanks.

The AZERTY layout is nothing if not inconsistent.

For this specific example, it is actually quite pragmatic. "é" being used many orders of magnitude more often than "ë" in French, it makes sense for it to have its own key.

Also, French has no other character that takes an acute accent. For the same reason, ç isn't typed with a dead key on French AZERTY.

The nordic layout(s) offer such a mechanism to allow people to type in letters that you'll find in various other European languages, even though the extra letters used in the languages themselves (ÅÄÖÆØ) are present as their own keys. Interestingly, the Swedish layout has no dedicated é key, although é occurs in some Swedish words.

In Swedish, Å, Ä, and Ö are actual letters of the alphabet, while é is used in foreign words. Like the English dieresis (e.g. in coöperate) is essentially unknown in the US and only occasionally used in England, so doesn't give rise to characters with dieresis on the keyboard.

é is used commonly in names and some words that don't feel foreign. For example the word for idea is written idé. Seems like it's an old loan from greek.

The accent gives away that this is in fact a loan from French

I guess it's time to learn to use some real swedish words then and not the foreign ones. Bye idé, hello hugskott. (Hug/håg = mind, skott = shot)

Danish is one.

Press the key to the left of 1 (not the numpad) or the right of the Eszett (sharp S) on the German QWERTZ keyboard and you probably hit a dead key. There are dedicated keys for the German umlauts and Eszett but these are for French accents in loan words: â, á and à, e.g. as in Café.

It's worth mentioning of course that there are no-dead-keys variants of the keyboard layout but this has been pretty much the norm on Windows since the 1990s I think.

> first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to.

That being exactly the way “floating diacritics” in ISO 2022 (or properly one of its Latin encodings, T.51 = ISO 6937) work, amusingly. I wonder which came first. (Yes, I know that a<BS>` came first, the ASCII spec even says that this should give you an accented character IIRC. Or perhaps it was one of the other “don’t call it ASCII” specs—ISO 646? IA5?..)

I expect to delete the character "á". And I prefer consistency too so I expect "œ" and "<emoji>" and "<emoji>" to be deleted as one unit.

edit: emojis are filtered by HN

Even the emoji's that you create by combining multiple emojis? Type one emoji, then a second, it merges into one. What happens when you backspace?

I expect the full emoji to be deleted. Because it merged into one visual entity.

I guess it's more ambiguous for some languages that can have long ligatures though.

I'd say delete the whole with backspace, but only the last if you undo.

But then if I type "á" directly (through, say, a mobile keyboard) and hit backspace, I'd get "a", which doesn't seem terrible but does feel a little off.

Seems like the right answer for codepoints vs graphemes, unfortunately, is dependent on the context.

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