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

[Doug]

On 12/14/2014 12:10 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> 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
>
I don't know if it's possible to reprogram the function keys, but
I would guess they get very little use, so it would be easy to put
the desired characters on the F keys. You would make a separate F-key
program for each language.

Spanish has three accented vowels, and ñ, so with upper and lower case,
that's 8 keys. I think Spanish also uses ç so 10. Add the ¿ and ¡ you
have 12.

Italian has four vowels with accents, but they go both ways, so you
would run out of F keys! Best would probably be to just use the F keys
for lower case, so you would only need 8.

French has three vowels with two diacrits (forward accent plus ^) and ç
so with upper and lower case each, that's 14, unless one of the diacrits
is not used with certain vowels. (I don't know French, so I don't know
if there are some vowels that don't take the ^ , for instance.)  No
complete answer for the F keys! Maybe do like Italian.

German has three vowels with umlauts and the ess-tset (ß) character. Eight,
if there is a "capital" ess-tset. (I haven't seen one in Compose. I think you
can use the lower case ß even in all up-case headings.)

I think languages like Polish are beyond this kind of solution!

--doug