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Only alive keys
November 30th, 2024
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In defense of no dead keys keyboard maps.
Those of us that have to use a latin alphabet
with non-ascii characters know the hustle
when learning UNIX. Some characters like
tilde (~) or caron (^), and backquotes and so
on are mapped as dead keys to be able to type
easily some characters essential to our day
to day prose. But *nix typescripting reserves
a lot of these characters to regex, shortcuts,
markdown code blocks,... you always end up typing
these twice to watch them appears.
Also, the classic way to type non-ascii characters
vary from OS to another, in mac there usually an
alt-? shortcut that suits your keyboard map,
in windows you enter unicode sequences
(seriously Windows, you are forcing half of the
world to google up characters to copy-paste them,
the 21st century was 24 years ago, stop it).
On Unix, there's the compose key.
The compose key is like this:
- you press the compose key (next key is treated as a dead key)
- you type a two-characters sequence like 's' and 'v'
- a 'composite' character is inputed 'ลก' [1]
This is easy, extensible, doesn't requires a
huge memory effort and is pretty intuitive.
But when you have deadkeys baked in your keyboard map
you have to press your deadkeys twice to get them
as composite characters.
I made the choice to set my keyboard variant
as "_nodeadkeys".
echo 'setxkbmap "ch" -v "fr_nodeadkeys"' >> $HOME/.xinitrc
It is pretty nice, even though I have to unlearn some
things, and rely solely on the compose key to type
some characters.
Happy typing in non-ascii,
happy tty-ing,
happy unixing,
[1] If this does appear mangled, set your browser or pager to utf-8
