@thomasfuchs Aye, for anything more complicated than an acute accent on a vowel (Ctrl+Alt) I just copy some foreign text into a scratchpad and compose my text with bits clipped from that, like it's a ransom note.
@thomasfuchs I must say I appreciate the rather recent feature in MacOS to just hold a key for a second to see other variants of a letter in some unusual language. Something I suppose was inspired by iOS.
@kennergf@thomasfuchs It’s so easy to replicate really. I wonder why it’s not there out of the box in most popular distributions (and let true hackers check it off).
@thomasfuchs I use a Compose key on Linux (hey, this is Mastodon, you were expecting a smug Linux weenie at some point, right?).
I can easily write æ, ö, ß, λ, ⊆, д, é, è and ☭, among many other more-or-less useful things.
(and this is also part of how US-ANSI keyboards ended up becoming my favourite physical layout, with the dubious side effect that I can barely use a Danish keyboard anymore.)
@thomasfuchs huh. Didn't realise US layouts don't have the Alt Gr that I use for this reason on my UK layout keyboard. My full real name contains an é. I use windows on my personal laptop. It's fine.
• change the keyboard language
• Not ideal, since your actual keyboard doesn't change
• memorise some pretty esoteric unicode strings; or
• use a virtual keyboard
Tbf, Macs don't handle all diacritics that well by default, but they do the most common pretty well.
Like Option then E gets you é. Option U gets ü and so on.
I guess that's a legacy of their prevalence in desktop publishing apps in the 90s.
@iamdavidobrien@thomasfuchs Yeah, I use the French accents often enough to be surprised that PCs don't handle them as easily. Thanks, this is very interesting.
@sarajw@iamdavidobrien@thomasfuchs For what? PC or Mac. For Mac, I'm a touch typer using US keyboard and it's nothing to add accents other than knowing which key commands trigger them.
@CStamp@iamdavidobrien@thomasfuchs same for me on PC, because it's just AltGr+E to get É. I hadn't realised it was so much harder with standard US layout.
@thomasfuchs@CStamp@sarajw@iamdavidobrien You add the US international input method and use a [Win] shortcut to switch, same as on a Mac with Ctrl Space. The keystrokes are almost the same but I think I recall they follow the dead keys scheme —first accent then letter.
I’ve been doing this for years as my first language is Spanish.
@gabriel@CStamp@sarajw@iamdavidobrien The point is that on a Mac you don't have to configure shit for this to work. It just does (as it should on Windows).
@thomasfuchs@CStamp@sarajw@iamdavidobrien You do, you have to add the US international layout for it to work properly. Accents are just the tip of the iceberg. Characters like these ¡¿ç ñ require configuring shit to work, exactly the same.
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