Special Characters

Patrick O'Callaghan pocallaghan at gmail.com
Wed Jun 15 19:20:56 UTC 2011


On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 11:19 -0600, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> Roelof 'Ben' Kusters wrote:
> 
> > I'm using the US English keyboard, and am so used to that, I don't want to
> > change the layout.
> 
> I type a lot in German and French and I also use the US 104-key generic layout. 
> In systemsettings/input devices/keyboard/layouts, you can select US-
> international with dead keys (sometimes called acentos).
> 
> This works great! You have exactly the same keys as are shown on the keyboard, 
> with the added enhancement that diacritical marks actually work the way they 
> are supposed to, ie., they wait until you type a letter after typing them 
> before displaying the accented character on the screen. If you want to type the 
> diacritical mark by itself, which occurs mostly with the apostrophe or the 
> quotation mark, you type alt-diacritical mark.

Or diacritical+space, which works all the time. I speak as one with an
apostrophe in my name :-)

> There is no relearning involved. 
> It all works naturally and the way it is supposed to.

+1

IMHO this is the only reasonable way to do accented characters. The
"compose-key" combos are hopeless for people who actually use accents
continually, as I do in Spanish. The other option (using a special
language keyboard) can be even worse. Imagine a keyboard with no visible
@, |, {, #, \ etc. Monolingual programmers need to aware that accents
aren't an optional extra but something that if you need them you need
them all the time and in every context (outside actual programming for
the most part). 

poc



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