typing characters not present on your keyboard (was Re: OT What does RET (Enter) do and how does it do it ??)

[Tim]

On Sat, 2007-08-25 at 20:42 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> I had such a situation some time ago. I was to write a custom app that needed 
> *full control* of the keyboard (meaning that no keypress gets swallowed by 
> any other app, no matter focus etc), and after reading all relevant HOWTOs, I 
> finally understood the process of reading off keyboard input. But, there was 
> nothing in the docs telling me how to lock the keyboard for my app. So, after 
> some digging, I downloaded the very source code for the simple "showkey" 
> program, and studied it. There, and only there, I actually found relevant 
> info on what I needed to do in my app. After that, life was beautiful... ;-) 

Speaking of such things, do you understand how xmodmap works?  I'd been
trying to do something in particular - to get some keys *somewhere* on
the keyboard, so that I can easily type in the traditional opening and
closing double quotes, as used in English text.  A few others would have
been useful, too, namely the EM and EN dashes.  The idea sounded simple
enough, but as best as I can tell, the xmodmap files only accept me
adding characters found in ISO-8859-1, which doesn't include the ones I
want to use.  It's not my locale, that is set to UTF-8, xmodmap seems to
be a rule unto itself.

I'm darned if I can find any documentation that helps me out, and it
does look like xmodmap is going to be the only way to do this
consistently across any application that uses the keyboard.  VIM being
the one that I use the most, I'm not using word processors for this
task.  I could live with only being able to do it within VIM, but it
would be nice if everything worked the same way.

I have played with using the compose feature, which does allow me to
type in things like æ, ü, etc., but it doesn't do the double quotes that
I can see some cheatsheets say that it can, and it's a darn awkward set
of composing characters to (allegedly) do so:  COMPOSE SHIFT < "

It would be another acceptable way of typing them, if it worked.
Though, I have to say that it'd be easier to do something like type ALT
F11 or ALT F12, for one of them or the other, than the four key sequence
that using the compose feature entails.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

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