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

[Peter Pearson]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2015 15:05:47 -0600, Skip Montanaro wrote:
[snip]
> One of the things I really like about my Skype keyboard (and likely
> other "soft" keyboards on Android) is that when you hold down a "key"
> for a brief moment, a little mini keyboard pops up, from which you can
> easily choose various accented variants and other symbols. 
[snip]
> (C-u 2 5 - suffices in Emacs to
> bat out 25 hyphens). Being an American with an American keyboard, I
> haven't the slightest idea how to type any accented characters or
> common symbols using the many modifier keys on my keyboard, and no key
> caps display what the various options are. And I'm getting kind of
> tired of going to Google and searching for "degree symbol". :-/
[snip]

Again, not what you asked for, but since you use Emacs . . . Are you
aware of Emacs's control-backslash ("toggle-input-method") command?
If I'm going to be writing French or Spanish, I hit control-backslash
and type "latin-prefix".  Then, until I hit control-backslash again,
"'e" becomes é, "~n" becomes ñ, '"o' becomes ö, and many other
not-too-hard-to-remember things.  Many other "input methods" are
available for other languages.

It's actually reminiscent of how Spanish typewriters used to work,
with an accent key that didn't advance the carriage.

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