Typing the λ (lambda) character with the compose key on Xorg

My Google-foo is usually pretty good, because I usually understand the conceptual framework within which I'm looking for a detail. This is not the case with the X11 system. The last reasonable overview I'm familiar with is the O'Reilly X System Administrators Guide ( http://www.amazon.com/Windows-System-Administrators-Definiti... ) from 1992 (volumes 1-7 are mostly about protocol details, primitives and libraries). Things introduced since then are a jumble to me.

What should I read for an update? I'm mostly in the Red Hat/Fedora ecosystem, which includes a multitude of upper layers.

After reading the post, I was curious how to do the same thing on OS X.

I knew there was a menu for special characters built into all text inputs, so I searched help for "characters." The first result was Edit->Special Characters, which showed a shortcut of ⌘+⎇+T. I searched the special characters for "lamda" and selected the first result. After that, I figured out how to easily type λ often. You can add a string substitution in System Prefs -> Language & Text -> Text.

No googling. No config files. No restarting X. ♥ My biggest issue was finding the ⌘ symbol, which is classified as "place of interest sign" in the technical symbols category.

For me, changing the GTK+ input method was as easy as right-clicking in any GTK+ dialog box and picking "Input Methods" → "System (Simple)", rather than having to mess with /etc/environment. That setting seems to have stuck even through reboots.

I also highly recommend you look through the standard XCompose file, since there's a lot of handy symbols—like <Compose><hyphen><hyphen><hyphen> for an em-dash, <Compose><hyphen><greater-than> for an arrow, or <Compose><C><C><C><P> for ☭.

I use the compose key extensively and I think that one of the best .XCompose file out there is the one of kragen [1]. It has a lot of bindings and they are easy to remember. λ is <Multi_key> <asterisk> <l> (actually all greek letters are on <Multi_key> <asterisk> [letter]).

[1] https://github.com/kragen/xcompose/blob/master/dotXCompose