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

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Tue, 10 Feb 2015 15:29:00 -0600, Tim Chase writes:
>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

Wow.  US keyboards do not come with a 'compose' key, then?  It just
never occurred to me that Skip might be missing one.

Oh, goodness gracious then, go with this solution.  Much better than
mine --though the one I pointed at is great should you suddenly need
to type something in cyrillic while at a non-cyrillic keyboard.

Laura