I know this is way off-topic for this group, but I figured if anyone in the online virtual communities I participate in would know the answer, the Pythonistas would... Google has so far not been my friend in this realm.
One of the things I really like about my Skype keyboard (and likely other "soft" keyboards on Android) is that when you hold down a "key" for a brief moment, a little mini keyboard pops up, from which you can easily choose various accented variants and other symbols. For instance, If I press and hold the "d" key, I see these choices (ignore the capitalization of the first letter - my mistake sending a text message to myself from my phone, and I can't seem to convert it to lower case): Đ|¦&dðď While I'm a touch typist, I almost never use auto-repeat, which is the "binding" of held keys in most environments (curse you, IBM and your Selectric!). These days I find my self needing accented characters much more frequently than key repeat (C-u 2 5 - suffices in Emacs to bat out 25 hyphens). Being an American with an American keyboard, I haven't the slightest idea how to type any accented characters or common symbols using the many modifier keys on my keyboard, and no key caps display what the various options are. And I'm getting kind of tired of going to Google and searching for "degree symbol". :-/ Is there an X11 or Mac extension/program/app/magic thing which I can install in either environment to get this kind of functionality? I'm thinking that if you hold down a key for the auto-repeat interval, instead of the key repeat thing making all sorts of duplicates, a little window would pop up over/near the insertion point, which I can navigate with the arrow keys, then hit RET to accept or ESC (or similar) to cancel. It need not be perfect. It might (for example) only work in certain environments (Chrome, Emacs, vim, Firefox). Anyplace to start. It need even be written in Python (though that would be cool.) I think that once something like this caught hold, it would fairly quickly take over from the dark lords of auto-repeat. Thx, Skip -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
