OT: disabling <ctrl><shift>f produces a "find" menu.

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sun, 2014-12-14 at 23:22 +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Sun, 2014-12-14 at 12:21 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > You can avoid the special Compose key by an appropriate keyboard
> > selection that supports dead keys. I use UK International so to type
> á
> > I hit ' and a. Similarly ñ is ~ and n, and so on. This is under KDE
> > but I assume the same thing would work with Gnome.
> 
> I'd tried that in the past, but then it made it horrible to type in
> normal punctuation.  Commas, apostrophes, etc., had to be typed twice,
> to get them to appear.  I use them, a lot, and having to do that was
> horrid.

I have a little layout button in the KDE panel that can easily switch
dead keys on and off. IOW the keyboard is essentially modal. You can
also define a key combo to do the same thing. I much prefer this to the
Compose key method as I frequently type long pieces of text in Spanish
and having to hit the Compose key all the time gets old really fast. I'm
not unaware of the double-key issue (I even have to use it when typing
my own name :-) but I've just become used to it. In fact I type dead-key
followed by spacebar to get the desired effect, which is really easy.

> It's about damn time that a proper international keyboard was brought
> out, to supersede querty.  One where all the usual accents, and extra
> punctuation, are on their keys (such as where the, usually, useless F
> keys are).

Can't see that happening any time soon. When you've tried to use a
European (non-English) keyboard and can't find @ or \ or $ (random
examples only) you see how complex this could be. Look at the keyboards
for some Asian languages.

poc