TECH (was Cool Mac Unicode)

On Mon, 2008-11-10, Paul Bennett wrote:

> Linux here too, at least sometimes, and I've grown to love mapping the
> Compose action to the otherwise-redundant (for me) "Menu" key.
> Can anyone here help me explore the Compose key further…?

Actually, the Compose key is not a shift key like AltGr, but an escape
key. When you press it, the computer waits to see if the next two keys
represent a valid code for something else, so it's not confined to
applying diacritics. Try the sequences Compose co, Compose p!, and
Compose ?? and you'll see what I mean.

The combinations are generally listed in
/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
If your distro puts them somewhere else, searching for en_US.UTF-8 will
find them. The file is plain text and easily understood and modified.
Alternatively, you can put a list of additions or alterations into
~/.Compose.

If you have the Gnome desktop, you may find a few don't work. If so, the
cure is to insert the line
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
into the file /etc/environment.

You can find out all about special characters and keyboards in Linux at
http://www.linuxquestions.org
Go to the wiki there and look up "foreign characters" and "keyboards".