Comment by ThatMedicIsASpy

5 months ago

I have started using triple dots as on Linux I can get them with Alt Gr + .

A lot of symbols can be accessed with Alt Gr compared to Windows

13 comments

ThatMedicIsASpy

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Symbiote  5 months ago

Enable the Compose key and you'll get even more easy symbols, and they're reasonably guessable.

  Compose ` e produces è
          " a produces ä
          v s produces š
          v S produces Š
          a e produces æ
          C = produces €
          l - produces £
          - > produces → 
        ( 1 ) produces ①
          ^ 1 produces ¹
          _ 1 produces ₁
          1 8 produces ⅛
        - - - produces —
        - - . produces –
          . . produces …
          . - produces ·
          | - produces †
          | = produces ‡
          " < produces “
          x x produces ×
          m u produces µ
          > = produces ≥

See /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose for the list and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

I have also configured Shift+Compose to send the code 'dead_greek' using ~/.Xmodmap:

  keycode 135 = Multi_key dead_greek Multi_key Multi_key

Then I can type α, β, γ, Δ, Ε, Ζ easily, although I hardly ever need this nowadays.

notpushkin  5 months ago

Please don’t... Adding ellipsis as a separate character was a huge mistake, because it doesn’t work well:

- you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it

- the spacing between the dots is awful in a lot of fonts

- it is hideous in monospace

- typing ellipsis properly is a very easy gesture (triple-tap the dot key), arguably easier than Alt Gr + . (depending on the keyboard)

  • dragonwriter  5 months ago

    > you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it

    But an ellipsis is separate from and doesn't mmerge with sentence-terminal punctuation, whether its a period or somethig else (when it replaces words at the end of a sentence, the terminal punctuation follows the ellipsis, when at the beginning of a sentence that follows another, the ellipsis follows the punctuation.) The constructs you say can't be formed with it aren't needed.

    • notpushkin  5 months ago

      Hmm, yeah, you’re right – in English this isn’t really used. However it’s a widely used punctuation in Russian (and many ex-USSR languages, too), so... no, they are needed in some cases.

      2 replies →

    • Moru  5 months ago

      This is why we only had ascii in the start. You don't need those other characters anyway. (For english...)

      Meanwhile there are a lot of languages and cultures. Somewhere all those characters were useful for something. My Atari had a very fun utility that gave you a compose-key that could combine just about everything on the keyboard to access all those weird characters of the extended ascii table. <compose>+ao would give you "a" with a ring on top (å), <compose>+ae gave the danish welded together character that I can't even type any more on windows.

      The idea came from some unix thing I believe.

      2 replies →

  • pxc  5 months ago

    I've only ever typed that character using a compose key: caps and then the same three periods.