On Wednesday, February 11, 2015 at 2:36:23 AM UTC+5:30, Skip Montanaro wrote: > 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
Nice question – I too await an answer. Was amused when gmail offered facilities to type devanagari. After using for a while found it way too clever for my taste and found emacs' itrans input method better — emacs is slightly dumb, gmail is way too clever. Here is (Yuri Khan's answers) about changing Xorg keyboard maps: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gnu.emacs.help/Yuri$20X$20Rusi/gnu.emacs.help/yesOU0m0vIE/CEvhlRZZY6kJ Here is a rather neat general collection of compose settings: https://github.com/rrthomas/pointless-xcompose¹ > And I'm getting kind of tired of going to Google and searching for "degree > symbol". :-/ Yeah… More to add to your question than to answer: my recent blog post: blog.languager.org/2015/01/unicode-and-universe.html Towards the end there are multi-levels of input methods. It would be good to work out in greater detail the intermediate levels between "google for degree symbol" and "type degree symbol on keyboard" ¹ He does not explain how to setup compose though the whole point of pointless(!) is to use it. $ setxkbmap -option compose:menu # set compose to menu (Windows-menu) $ setxkbmap -option compose:rwin # to rwin $ setxkbmap -option compose:ralt # to ralt (the usual AltGr) $ setxkbmap -query # examine current settings $ setxkbmap -option # No option -- turns off all options -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
