Typing accented characters (for ignorant 'murricans) (Shallow Thoughts)

Typing accented characters (for ignorant 'murricans)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Today's holiday tip involves how to type international characters.

For the online Spanish class I've been taking, so far I've been able to manage without having to type characters like ñ or á. Usually, if I need one I can find it in one of the class examples, copy it, and paste it wherever I need it. But obviously that would be tedious if I needed to type much.

I hacked up a quickie workaround: a python script that shows a set of buttons, one for each accented character I'm likely to need. Clicking a button copies that character to the clipboard, so I can now paste via mouse middleclick or ctrl-V. (I'm sure that sounds pathetic to those of you who type accented characters every day, but it's not something most US English speakers need to do. And besides, now I know how to access the X clipboard from Python-GTK -- hooray for learning new things from procrastination projects!)

Anyway, Mikael Magnusson took pity on me and explained in simple language how to use the X "Multi key" to type these characters the right way (well, a right way, anyway). Since all the online instructions I've seen have been rather complicated, here are the simple instructions for any of my fellow US monolingists who'd like to expand their horizons:

First, choose a key for the "Multi key" that you're not using for anything else. A lot of people use one of the Alt or Windows keys, but I use both of those already. What I don't use is the Menu key (that little key down by the right Ctrl key, at least on my keyboard) since not many Linux apps support it anyway.

Find the keycode for that key, by firing up xev and typing the key. For my Menu key, the keycode is 117.

Now type:

xmodmap -e "keycode 117 = Multi_key"

Now you're ready to type a sequence like: [Menu] ~ n to type an n-tilde, [Menu] ' a for an accented a, or [menu] ? ? for the upside-down question mark, in any app that supports those characters.

Of course, you don't want to type that xmodmap command every time you log in, so to make it permanent, put this in your .Xmodmap (you're on your own for figuring out whether your X environment reads .Xmodmap automatically or whether you need to tell it to run xmodmap .Xmodmap when X starts up):

keycode 117 = Multi_key

I have one final useful international input tidbit to offer: how to type Unicode characters by number. Hold ctrl+shift+U, then release U but keep holding the other two while you type a numeric sequence. (This may only work in gtk apps.) For instance, try this: hold down ctrl and shift, then type: u 2 6 6 c. Cool, huh? You can use the "gucharmap" program to find other neat sequences (hint: View->By Unicode Block otherwise you'll never find anything).

Now it's time to check the turkey. Have a good day, everyone!

Tags: linux, i18n, keyboard
[ 17:03 Nov 22, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]