Gregory's Server|
108 comments
@wandrecanada @mathewi Why do it simply when you can do it in a complicated and mysterious fashion, you mean? Are there really no keyboard layouts for English in Windows that would provide dead diacritics or other trivial and mnemonic way to get common accented letters? Numeric codes are so last century. Sorry. @tml @mathewi I'm being very tongue in cheek about the old work arounds for non english language supports. It used to be a major pain in the petoot to switch keybaord language modes. For anyone in Canada trying to type in French we had to learn the char map codes for non English characters or just omit accents.  @wandrecanada @tml @mathewi Instructions to install keyboard layouts with accented letters: http://www.igaidhlig.net/en/category/accented-letters/ Of course, getting these layouts installed in school networks can be a problem, especially when they have been outsourced... @gunchleoc @wandrecanada @tml @mathewi After installing a second keyboard/language layout, you can hold down right-Alt and Shift to switch between them (I have ENG and ISL installed and I just discovered that you can press the Windows key and space together instead). Then I just hit the accent key followed by the character I want accented. Alternately, you can pop up the on-screen keyboard (it can be complicated so search for it in the task-bar search field). @EvilKiru @gunchleoc @tml @mathewi Yep all good suggestions. Alt-Shift was added to Win 8 natively and it's a very powerful tool for multi lingual support. There were some earlier tools around as well but I haven't seen anything from the 90s when it was a pain point for me. I think there were some macro style work arounds? @wandrecanada I just tested creating a custom layout - it still works in Windows 11 https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-custom-keyboard-layout-windows/  @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi I guess you could map a key to open the Beyoncé Wikipedia article  @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi I remapped caps lock to compose so typing is <caps lock> <'> <e>. It works really well @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi you can do it with alt gr but I didn't learn about this until I was setting up a mechanical keyboard for the first time and it requires specific keyboard layouts to be selected to get the extra layer of diacritics. @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi sorry missed the 'in Windows' no idea if there is an equivalent. @wandrecanada @mathewi the first computer i had connected to a modem wouldn't type "@". It was in the keyboard but the old shoebox wouldn't recognize it. So i used to copy email addresses and "trim" the @ to reuse it. Then I learned the alt+shift thing  @wandrecanada @mathewi alt 130 in this case, those were the days... My mind still mentions 225 when I see ß  @wandrecanada @mathewi I recently discovered that that was only possible from the numeric keypad  @mathewi does Apple have a patent on the clever dead-keys system? Even if they did, it's been in use for well over 35 years. option ⌥ e then e = é   @PetterOfCats @pmcg @mathewi I just tried this in Notepad and Word and all it did was produce an endless string of e's. @Nonya_Bidniss @pmcg "Character Map and Notepad", I can only assume you tried it on Windows. We were speaking of Apple devices. sorry for the confusion. I should have been more clear. @PetterOfCats @pmcg Ok, sorry. The original post was about Windows and I missed the bit where the discussion became about Apple. I see it now. 😏 p.s. Windows sucks @Nonya_Bidniss @pmcg lol I agree. Thank you for pointing out. I’ve edited my post so it won’t confuse anyone (hopefully). @PetterOfCats @Nonya_Bidniss yeah what I am talking about is the old-fashioned way like from Mac OS 7 (and well before that). If you want to push and hold on it, that is the iPad way. There are ways to toggle them in System Preferences … errrrrrrr System Systems.  @pmcg @PetterOfCats @Nonya_Bidniss However, it still works in current versions of OSX. Growing up as an Apple guy I've always been floored that Windows and Linux don't just do this. This is like a very basic functionality of computers.  @PetterOfCats @pmcg @mathewi There's one place I know of where holding down a key repeats it instead of pulling up the alternate chars: the #Mac's Terminal. But dead-key accents still work. @waltertross @PetterOfCats @mathewi on MacOS it is a system setting where you can choose not to have it behave like an iPhone keyboard. Although in recent OS Settings app, I can't remember where it is. @atzanteol @mathewi yeah similar. I use Linux sometimes but I am not familiar with that. Does it (probably does) rely on the windowing server? Yeah - there used to be an actual "compose" key on old Unix keyboards. But these days you tend to re-map something like "caps lock" to the compose key because "caps lock" is just useless.  @atzanteol @pmcg @mathewi There's a perfectly good useless key with four mysterious squares on it in between my ctrl and alt. :blobfoxdealwithitfingerguns:   @pmcg @mathewi http://andrewdunning.ca/Mac-Keyboard-Layouts-for-Windows/ is a thing (being a MSKLC-generated layout, though, it doesn’t have an ARM64 version, only x86, AMD64, and Itanium)  @mathewi #ImageDescription is missing. #plzfix by adding #AltText to the image, as you can edit the post.  Tweet by Graeme Coleman Hello, my name is Graeme, I have a I open Vim, type the digraph and copy-paste that 😅 (I will now see myself to the nearest padded room) @ashtardeza @hllizi @mathewi Oh, I didn't know that, thanks! https://vimhelp.org/digraph.txt.html @mathewi on windows, I use windows-space to switch to an Irish keyboard, right-alt e, And then windows-space again to switch back. YMMV.   @aunteef @mathewi thanks for that! Apart from having multiple virtual keyboards on my Mac and iOS devices, I also use https://www.unicodeit.net when I know the LaTeX equivalent of what I need…  @mathewi This was easier back in the day of manual typewriters. So long as you'd specified dead-key accents when you bought yours. @mathewi@journa.host LOL.  @mathewi@journa.host @mathewi@journa.host    Few days ago I learned from a Canadian, that French should be listed as an ICD-11 disease...   @jpelckolsen @iju @mathewi two-handed typing! Oh, the Danish one was for now the very best foreign one for me. Already equal used to use US and German keyboard, the DK was a dream... All keyboards in my electric workspace are still Danish - I left DK +2 years ago.  @mathewi Just use a European keyboard. You will still find all characters as usual. Brackets, braces and backslash need some AltGr combination though. European keyboards are 105 keys, US ones are 104.  @mathewi @mathewi On a Mac SE from 1987 with System 5 or 6 you could just type ´ and e to get é. Choose your tool chain wisely.   @mathewi I have yet to figure out why it turns off sometimes, but a! long-press on most letters on Mac and Android keyboards produces a selection list of accented, diacritics, and ligatures... No emoji yet, but I'm sure someone's working on it 😉  Und ich hatte mich gewundert, warum Beyoncé so bekannt ist. Liegt gar nicht an der Musik, sondern an der Tastatur. @mathewi I was doing the same for years and I discovered Microsoft PowerToys a few month ago 😅   @mathewi Week 6 of 8 in #Montpellier levelling up my French and enjoying the convenience that is the Compose key. I have witnessed teachers resort to copier coller as fallback, websites usually have some form of screen keyboard. I would like to suggest multi language support (as in "I permanently use more than one") as one major unsolved CS issues right behind the Top Three cache invalidation, naming things, Unicode and off-by-one errors 🤡  Every time I want to type a ° I have to open up charmap. It's easier to just type out the entire word.  @mathewi I was about to be all wtf - but apparently with the US layout it's not possible. Didn't know they didn't have the Alt Gr Key - AltGr + E = É in the UK layout. @mathewi@journa.host dead keys and altgr save my day with special characters  @mathewi And for those hard to find weird and wonderful symbols my Linux box lets me use ctrl-shift-u<unicode value><ret>. No idea how to do that on windows. @mathewi I have a colleague from Turkey who's name contains a "ğ". @mathewi the European keyboard layout is my solution for this, specially for us bilinguals.  @mathewi @genegoykhman I found a PowerToys tool that gives windows the ability to do “hold down key for similar symbols” a la macOS. Unfortunately, it didn’t know to disable when a game is in the foreground, so sustained movement would regularly trigger the function and stop me mid-step… @matt hah I set up AutoHotKey in Windows to remap a mouse button or something but for some reason it caused me to negligently throw a grenade every time I loaded into a Crucible match. Took me months to figure out what was happening.  @mathewi Any time I want accented characters, I start with a long press on an Android keyboard. If that doesn't help, I use the Charm app on Android. If I want the character on the laptop, I e-mail it to myself from the phone :-) |
@mathewi I learned the arcane arts of alt + 0233 in the 1990s.
There are some who say this hidden apocrypha can still be deciphered in the scrolls of Character Map.
Praise the Omnissiah!