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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

It would be great to make this feature relevant again but use decimal unicode codes, and have it work in linux too this way; it can be really useful now and then (as an alternative to looking up the unicode character on the internet and copypasting it)

I remember using this back in the day for ALT+0160 to type non breaking space, which could do funny things in forums and chat programs like MSN and ICQ

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I think urxvt has this feature, but it's also available via the Universal Input Method System in many widget sets and it is supported by both Gtk and Qt (might need some additional packages to be installed/setup). So I can just type the symbol in hexadecimal with Ctrl+Shift+U 2 6 0 3 Enter to enter .

I used to remember the unicode symbol for long dash—but now that I use EUR keymap I don't need to, and I've forgotten it :).

edit: oh crud, HN filters snowmans :(.

Just enable the compose key and forget all about having to memorize numbers. Just tap [compose][-][-][-] for —, and [compose][-][-][.] for –.

Compose is nicely user-extensible (~/.XCompose) for those with domain-specific needs; it's one of the few workstation-era holdovers that DesktopLinux™ hasn't ruined yet.

This is by far the most intuitive way to me. I rely on it even on Windows thanks to WinCompose instead of trying to memorize these alt-codes.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mirror/libX11/master/nls/e...

http://wincompose.info/

The way Mac does it is even easier. You just hold down the lay, and you get a popup with numbered options.

I like being able to type them without looking :)

That's easier if you don't know the keybinds, but the faster way is using the Option key to type the accented letter in 2 parts. You first press Option along with one of: `, e, u, i, n. And then just press the letter you want to apply the corresponding accent to.

On the rare occasions I need one of them, it's rarely one of the common ones. I work with a lot of music scores with lots of weird French and Germany characters that are a little more involved.

On the Mac, it's quite easy to have customized keyboard layouts to make it easy to type characters you use frequently. If you want to have Option-f and Option-p to give you 𝆑 and 𝆏, you can. https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ is a nice GUI that lets you start from your current preferred layout and make changes.

I made my own cross-platform keyboard layout for this: https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey. The compose key is nice, but especially on Windows, I find that an actual keyboard layout gives a better experience.

this is beautiful. but soo many dead keys.

I used to use compose key a long time ago (indeed some keyboards had an actual "compose" key), but then it just seems that I so rarely need to use the many characters available through it, that plain Gnome search for the unicode character name (that sticks the character to the keyboard) serves me fine.

Besides, there's no compose sequence for snowman, is there?

Not by default, but put in your ~/.XCompose:

    <Multi_key> <O> <o> : ""   U2603 # SNOWMAN

or whatever it is you want, where "" contains a snowman that HN strips. (Depending on your system, you may then need an `ibus restart` or some such thing to have your change picked up.)

♥ I love the Compose key ♥ and use it all the time.

I wish it had interactive dialog box for better discoverability of compose sequences, showing you a list of possible alternatives based on the characters you have already typed.

In default configuration in Gnome there are too few combinations and you cannot enter many important characters.

> It would be great to make this feature relevant again but use decimal unicode codes, and have it work in linux too this way [...]

IBus[1] can (apparently) do that!

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IBus#Unicode_input

Is decimal really that important? Hitting ctrl+u <codepoint in hexadecimal> Enter has worked on every desktop linux machine I've tried it on. e.g. U+A0 instead of ALT+0160 for no-break space.

U+fdfd is probably the character I use it with the most.

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