On 2009-02-17, Paul Hartman <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is a "US-International" layout that makes the right-alt
> behave like Alt Gr, and allowing easier entry for non-English
> (mostly Spanish) characters. I don't know if US-International
> keyboards actually exists or if it's just a virtual layout.
> However, even then, it does not behave like the "Compose" key
> as described by the Wikipedia article, which makes it sound
> like a dead key.
A dead key and a compose key are related, but not quite the
same thing. A dead key is one that when struck doesn't
generate a "letter" but instead modifies the "letter" that's
generated by the next keystroke. Unlike a modifier like
shift/alt/control, a dead key or a compose key is struck and
released and then the next key is struck. Some non-English
keyboards have deadicated deadkeys for commonly used accents.
Dead keys are more-or-less the equivalent of a typewriter key
that imprints a glyph onto the paper but doesn't move the
platen (or the type-ball, if you want to think like a
selectric).
What a compose key does is temporarily make the _next_ key
struck act like a dead key.
To enter รด, you strike compose, ^, o. Hitting compose makes
the ^ key temporarily into a dead key.
> It's just a modifier, like Shift. It doesn't indicate any
> combining of following keystrokes. Maybe it does act like that
> for other layouts. It's all news to me, as I've never used any
> non-US keyboard. :)
Me neither. I've set up right-ALT as my compose key. [How do
you enter accented or non-latin characters without a compose
key?]
The problem is that it stopped working recently in aterm, and I
can't figure out why. In aterm, if I hit compose ^ o, I just
get "^o". In urxvt, compose sequences are ignored completely.
Furthermore, both aterm and urxvt correctly _display_ non-ascii
characters that were entered in other applications using
compose sequences. You can even paste them into aterm and
urxvt. You just can't enter them from the keyboard.
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! over in west
at Philadelphia a puppy is
visi.com vomiting ...
