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

[Kushal Kumaran]

Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.
>

For very, very occasional use in emacs, there's C-x 8 RET (insert-char).

>From it's documentation:

    Interactively, prompt for CHARACTER.  You can specify CHARACTER in
    one of these ways:

    - As its Unicode character name, e.g. "LATIN SMALL LETTER A".
      Completion is available; if you type a substring of the name
      preceded by an asterisk `*', Emacs shows all names which include
      that substring, not necessarily at the beginning of the name.

    - As a hexadecimal code point, e.g. 263A.  Note that code points in
      Emacs are equivalent to Unicode up to 10FFFF (which is the limit
      of the Unicode code space).

    - As a code point with a radix specified with #, e.g. #o21430
      (octal), #x2318 (hex), or #10r8984 (decimal).

For your "degree symbol" example, I did C-x 8 RET, then typed in
*degree<TAB>, and emacs found some matches, resulting in this: °

-- 
regards,
kushal