Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninalanyon | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone bothers reinventing the keyboard I would rather that it were made practical to easily and reliably type accented and other characters on a UK keyboard in all applications. I use English and Norwegian regularly with the occasional French, German, or Swedish word. I have been unable to find a simple method of configuring Linux Mint to support these other than by switching layouts every time I need an ø or and e acute, etc.

I did once get the compose key to work but the settings didn't survive an upgrade and I have been unable to get them to work again in Firefox.

View on HN

Use character composition. You then type those characters buy pressing compose key (I've set it to Caps Lock) and then sequence of characters. Much easier than switching keyboard layouts, and you can type other non-usual characters like °, µ, €

ø = Compose -> / -> o

é = Compose -> ' -> e

° = Compose -> o -> o

µ = Compose -> m -> u

€ = Compose -> = -> e

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libX11/plain/nls/en_US...

takes a bit of time but you end up being fast enough without changing keyboard layout, pretty great

The Compose approach is extremely handy if you need to type several languages (e.g.: Spanish, German and Pinyin).

A wrote a short article on it a while ago: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/07/12/typing-non-english-...

I also keep a handy alias to quickly find how to write new symbols:

    alias compose='fzf < /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose'

The compose key defined in Linux Mint's own keyboard settings doesn't work in Firefox.

MacOS developers have solved this problem pretty neatly:

https://support.apple.com/en-qa/guide/mac-help/mh27474/mac

This is cool!:-)

How come this is not the first “tip” on a fresh Mac?

Is there a similar trick for non-letter characters ?

Yes, for some of them, but not all.

I've not been able to find a convenient online image showing the characters you get from holding down alt while typing, it may vary by layout, but for me this lets me type:

Number row: ¡€#¢∞§¶•ªº–≠ with shift: ⁄™‹›ﬁﬂ‡°·‚—±

First row: œ∑´®†¥¨^øπ“‘ with shift: Œ„‰ÂÊÁËÈØ∏”’

Home row: åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æ« with shift: ÅÍÎÏÌÓÔÒÚÆ»

Bottom row: `Ω≈ç√∫~µ≤≥÷ with shift: ŸÛÙÇ◊ıˆ˜¯˘¿

But of those, I only remember €, # (both printed on the key!), ∞, ƒ, ™, π/∏ (thanks to growing up with MacOS classic — Marathon Infinity for ∞, ƒ for folders, ™/π/∏ no idea why), and –/— (en-dash/m-dash, not sure why I learned them, but was one surprise source of compile-time errors around 2010 because they look exactly like - in a fixed-width font).

If you ever used MPW shell, a lot of those characters were part of the syntax of commands and the regular expression parser so it was common to learn to compose ∫,® ∂ etc. The debugger TMON also used them, so they just become second nature, like !@#.

Neat, did not know that. At the time MPW shell was used, it was a little bit too advanced for me — I was only as far as working my way through C For Dummies (or something like that) with a limited student edition of CodeWarrior* around the time REALbasic came out.

* Possibly bronze edition? Whatever it was, it was 68k only.

It's very useful but it's sloooow

This is cool!

But I thought you were going to recommend pressing "fn" to switch layouts (I believe you can use either fn or ctrl+space on macOS).

I use to switch from German (for chat/documentation) and English (for coding), and it's quite instant and second nature to me.

`~/.XCompose` is your friend.

I frequently input International Phonetic Alphabet glyphs, some polytonic Greek, some Spanish and some Old English. Nothing is more than three key-presses away after an AltGr.

I'll look into that. The compose key defined in Linux Mint's own keyboard settings doesn't work in Firefox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com