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

[alister]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2015 23:15:11 +0100, Laura Creighton wrote:

> 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

English keyboards (US & UK) don't have a compose key because wee do not 
normaly use accented characters (except when dealing with people that do 
& then being lazy we often cheat & don't bother with them. Apologies to 
all who do use them this is very poor behaviour)




-- 
No character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated 
attacks,
however false.
		-- Alexander Hamilton