Re: Input method or help feature needed

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> writes:

>> Once in a while I want to enter some character that I know exists in
>> Unicode, though I know nothing about where to find it.  Today it was
>> the Turkish i without dot.
>>
>> It is not easy to find how to enter the character you want.
>> Can anyone develop a way to make it easier?
>
> The X11 compose feature actually has pretty easy to remember ways to
> input such characters.  For example, the dotless i can be generated by
> <Multi_key> <i> <.> (<Multi_key> is usually on Shift-RControl).

Isn't that limited to a "common" set of characters in a single locale
though...?

I've tried a lot of these methods before, and the one that generally
seems to work best for obscure characters, and those I'm not used to,
is the "C-x RET * substring TAB" method.

Yeah you need to know or guess part of the name, but the unicode names
are reasonably well chosen, pretty regular, and all you need to know is
_part_ of it; once you can guess that, it's often easy to narrow the
number of choices enough to choose from the completion list...  (often
I'll guess a number of common terms for something, and get a hit after
2-3)

E.g. for dotless-i:  "C-x 8 RET * dotless i TAB" immediately narrows it
down to two choices; just "dotless" gives about 20.

-miles

-- 
`The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement'