On Thu, 2019-02-07 at 22:03 +1030, Tim via users wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 6 February 2019, Patrick O'Callaghan sent:
It's a question of basic usability. When I want to type an "international" character, it would be nice to see how to do it without having to root around in keyboard files. Accents are easy as I use dead keys (áéíóúñ) but other things are harder, e.g. the Spanish upside-down question mark which I can never remember how to get. I'm frankly surprised that no-one seems to have brought this up before.
I went with using the compose key, because of the lack of information about which keys to use (as we're discussing - quick key show utility), and I can usually figure out ways to type the usual culprits with the compose key (because it picks on common typewriter symbols that look a bit close to the accents you want to add to another character).
e.g. hit compose c then comma produces ç hit compose ? then ? produces ¿
Sure, except that now you only have to figure out which is the Compose key. This is not something I want to have to explain to a user, even if I can figure it out for myself if I read enough documentation. It's an absurd situation.
(Note that Windows is if anything even worse. The only dead-key settings officially supported are for US keyboards and I still haven't figured out how to type ñ on Windows w/o having to resort to some weird ALT-NNN combination. Seriously, life is too short for this nonsense).
I'd seriously like to see a new style of keyboard which includes more punctuation marks (dashes, proper quotes, different spaces, etc) on dedicated keys.
I'm not too fussed about that as inevitably no kb can include everything. What I want is for the magic combos to be *discoverable*. That's what the MacOS Key Viewer enables.
poc