Comment by Moru
10 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.
Good news! Compose key is available in Linux natively, and for Windows there’s WinCompose by Sam Hocevar: https://wincompose.info/
Thanks, have tried that one but I just don't write enough and the special characters I need is natively on my keyboard. But it's very nice for those that actually do write other things than code :-)