On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 10:42 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 14:29 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
Then consider any user in non-latin1 locale. For example, my locale is Russian. I have no "é" on my keyboard...
Well, I can use cut and paste, when I have a mouse and the text is already shown on my desktop. But what I have to do, when use just the cmdline interface? IOW, without any GUI -- just the Linux console, or remote ssh session? How can I fill the "é" character then?
You use the compose key like most the world has been using for a long time.
Another alternative (with different tradeoffs) is to use gucharmap. My workflow for entering Unicode characters is like this:
Alt-F2 gucha RET Ctrl-f e with RET (click on letter) Ctrl-c Alt-F4 Ctrl-v
It looks long, but really it's quite fast to type once you get used to it (the required click is a bug).
The advantages are that you don't need to know beforehand what the magic compose sequences are, and you can search for an arbitrary Unicode character, even ones with no corresponding compose sequence. The disadvantage is that it's slower than compose.