Wildly OT: pop-up virtual keyboard for Mac or Linux?

[Tim Chase]

On 2015-02-10 15:05, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> For instance, If I press and hold the "d" key, I see these choices
> (ignore the capitalization of the first letter - my mistake sending
> a text message to myself from my phone, and I can't seem to convert
> it to lower case):   Đ|¦&dðď
> 
> I haven't the slightest idea how to type any accented characters or
> common symbols using the many modifier keys on my keyboard
> 
> Is there an X11 or Mac extension/program/app/magic thing which I can
> install in either environment to get this kind of functionality?

While it's not exactly a hold-down-get-a-menu, I opt for changing my
(otherwise-useless) caps-lock key to an X compose key:

  $ setxkbmap -option compose:caps

I can then hit caps-lock followed by what are generally intuitive
sequences.  For your first one, that would be "capital-D minus".  I'm
not sure what the other characters are supposed to be, so I'm not
sure how to find them.  But é is "compose, e, apostrophe", ñ is
"compose, n, tilde", the degree sign is "compose, o, o", the € is
"compose, E, equals", etc. There are loads of these documented in (on
my machine, where my locale is en_US.UTF-8)
/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

Some of them are a little less intuitive, though the majority of the
time I can just guess them (I'd never typed "Đ" before, but guessed
and was right). Otherwise I search that above file.

This also has the advantage that it should work in every X
application, including Unicode-aware terminal applications (in
Unicode-aware terminals).  Adding some sort of press-and-hold UI
would limit it to those applications that chose to support it (or
even *could* support it).

> While I'm a touch typist, I almost never use auto-repeat, which is
> the "binding" of held keys in most environments

I agree, as vi/vim makes it easy to insert multiples of the same
character (or characters) akin to what you describe in Emacs.

-tkc