I use the ctrl-shift-u key combination to enter Unicode hexcodes. If I want an à, I type the letter a, press ctrl-shift-u, enter the Unicode hexcodes 0300, press spacebar or enter key, and the two are merged into the desired character à. At address 0300 starts a whole range of accents THAT ARE MERGED with the preceding character, so there isn't really that much to memorize. It is even possible to staple accents on top of each other, if there is a character representation defined for them. If I need a pinyin (Latin transcription of Mandarin Chinese) ü with first tone, I do this. Letter 'u' Ctrl-shift-u 0308 spacebar Ctrl-shift-u 0304 spacebar The first two steps produce a 'ü' The third step adds a horizontal line on top like in 'ū', but with the diacritical dots wedged in between the letter u and the horizontal line. I also could just enter the Unicode codepoint 01d6 to obtain the same character directly if I remember the hexcodes of those codepoints that I use a lot. The added advantage of this approach is, it is OS, codepage and keyboard layout independant. As long as you know how to enter the Unicode codepoints, you are set. On a Mac you first have to activate the Unicode keyboard. Then all you need to do is press the althkey, enter the 4 digit hexcodes and the character appears. On Linux and Mac that works for me in any application I use, terminal or desktop app. Haven't really used Windows for quite a few years now, so I don't remember reliably how it worked there, but you can look it up yourself should you need to. HTH Klaus On Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 18:45 Peter Suetterlin <pit@astro.su.se> wrote:
Patrick Shanahan wrote:
* Peter Suetterlin <pit@astro.su.se> [01-20-22 08:19]:
Which is why the Compose-Key (IMO) is so superior, as it's based son (some) logic.
Greek letters: [Compose][g][letter]: a-α, b->β etc. Same with umlauts/accents etc. [Compose][accent][letter]: ä,è,é etc.
So I really hope xmodmap stays available....
and odd that your combinations only partially work on my tumbleweed systems, <compose>"g"<letter>: provides only normaly ascii
Ah, that's true, in the default en_US.UTF-8 Compose map those are not defined, but one can dig out the definitions from /usr/share/X11/locale/*.UTF-8/Compose files, which is what I did (long ago....), and set up my ~/.XCompose as
# modified Compose table to allow greek characters # see also manpage Compose(5)
include "%L"
<Multi_key> <g> <A> : "Α" U0391 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA <Multi_key> <g> <a> : "α" U03B1 # GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA ..... etc
The include will first load whatever Compose is defined by your locale, and then add the rest. You can easily add any 'missing' shortcut that way.
HTH