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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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 like being able to type them without looking :)

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 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.

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.)

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

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