Character shortcuts
Polytropon
freebsd at edvax.de
Sat Mar 12 21:43:40 UTC 2011
On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:07:59 -0600, Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear FreeBSD experts,
>
> There has been something that I find hard to do, I would like to find
> a CTRL + KEY combination, or ALT + KEY combination to input special
> characters like (ñ) [ALT + 164 or ALT + 0241 in Mr. Gates OS].
>
> http://www.forlang.wsu.edu/help/keyboards.asp
>
> accents other symbols like copyright, euro, etc. I would like to do
> the same(have a special key combination) to get the characters in
> FreeBSD too, but googling have not found something that works. I even
> tried to run a litte program in the shell to generate the characters
> to use for cutting + pasting to no avial.
Depending on your keyboard and language settings, many
characters can be generated by Alt+Letter. There is also
a COMPOSE key on some keyboards - and those that don't
have it can be told to do so by xmodmap. Using the
COMPOSE approach, you combine a letter with an accent
or any other symbol, and if there is a matching result
in your character set (or font), it will be displayed.
Here are some examples:
Compose a a -> å (svedish a-circle)
Compose s s -> ß (german Eszett ligature)
Compose U " -> Ü (german U Umlaut, capital)
Compose L / -> Ł (polish L-stroke, capital)
Compose a , -> ą (polish a-comma)
Compose o / -> ø (danish o-stroke)
Compose k k -> ĸ (greek kappa)
Compose n ' -> ń (n with accent grave)
And of course: Compose n ~ -> ñ.
Depending on how characters like `, ´, ^ or ~ are handled
(single character immediately output, or combination
character that waits for the next letter to automatically
construct a new one), Compose may be needed or not. On the
default german keyboard setting, 'e gives é, ~n gives ñ
and ^a gives â immediately without using Compose.
My ~/.xmodmaprc contains (along with other lines):
add mod4 = Multi_key
keycode 117 = Multi_key
You can find out the keycodes using the "xev" program.
Your keyboard settings maybe sets other characters than
can be created with Alt+letter or AltGr+letter (the
german keyboard's right Alt key is labeled AltGr, or
Alt Graph on my Sun keyboard), e. g. ¬¹²³¼½¬{[]}\
@ł€¶ŧ←↓→øþþ¨ æßðđŋħjĸł˝^ «»¢“”nµ·, and with Shift
¬¡⅛£¤⅜⅝⅞™±°¿¿˛ ΩŁ€®Ŧ¥↑ıØÞ˚ ƧЪŊĦJ&Ł˝ˇ ¦<>©‘’Nº×÷.
So instead of memorizing arbitrary numbers as in MICROS~1
land, you can see a relation between the letter and the
key you need to press in order to generate it. You can
also rearrange them if you feel a need for that. :-)
--
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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