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

[Rustom Mody]

On Wednesday, February 11, 2015 at 2:36:23 AM UTC+5:30, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> I know this is way off-topic for this group, but I figured if anyone
> in the online virtual communities I participate in would know the
> answer, the Pythonistas would... Google has so far not been my friend
> in this realm.
> 
> 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. 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
> 
> While I'm a touch typist, I almost never use auto-repeat, which is the
> "binding" of held keys in most environments (curse you, IBM and your
> Selectric!). These days I find my self needing accented characters
> much more frequently than key repeat (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". :-/
> 
> Is there an X11 or Mac extension/program/app/magic thing which I can
> install in either environment to get this kind of functionality? I'm
> thinking that if you hold down a key for the auto-repeat interval,
> instead of the key repeat thing making all sorts of duplicates, a
> little window would pop up over/near the insertion point, which I can
> navigate with the arrow keys, then hit RET to accept or ESC (or
> similar) to cancel. It need not be perfect. It might (for example)
> only work in certain environments (Chrome, Emacs, vim, Firefox).
> Anyplace to start. It need even be written in Python (though that
> would be cool.) I think that once something like this caught hold, it
> would fairly quickly take over from the dark lords of auto-repeat.
> 
> Thx,
> 
> Skip

Nice question – I too await an answer.
Was amused when gmail offered facilities to type devanagari.
After using for a while found it way too clever for my taste and found emacs'
itrans input method better — emacs is slightly dumb, gmail is way too clever.

Here is (Yuri Khan's answers) about changing Xorg keyboard maps:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gnu.emacs.help/Yuri$20X$20Rusi/gnu.emacs.help/yesOU0m0vIE/CEvhlRZZY6kJ

Here is a rather neat general collection of compose settings:
https://github.com/rrthomas/pointless-xcompose¹

> And I'm getting kind of tired of going to Google and searching for "degree symbol". :-/


Yeah…  More to add to your question than to answer: my recent blog post:
blog.languager.org/2015/01/unicode-and-universe.html

Towards the end there are multi-levels of input methods.
It would be good to work out in greater detail the intermediate levels between
"google for degree symbol" and "type degree symbol on keyboard"

¹ He does not explain how to setup compose though the whole point of pointless(!) is to use it.

$ setxkbmap -option compose:menu  # set compose to menu (Windows-menu)
$ setxkbmap -option compose:rwin  # to rwin
$ setxkbmap -option compose:ralt  # to ralt (the usual AltGr)
$ setxkbmap -query        # examine current settings
$ setxkbmap -option       # No option -- turns off all options