German keyboard key bindings?

German keyboard key bindings?

[Ulrich Neumerkel]

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On German keyboards many important Emacs commands are not easily
accessible.  In particular C-/ (undo) and M-/ (dabbrev-expand)
are very difficult to type (i.e. one types C-Shift-7 or M-Shift-7) thus
hampering the smooth flow of typing, Emacs users with US-american keyboards
enjoy.

Redefining the keys that are present on the same position does not seem
to be a good idea since this would undermine the canonical meaning of
certain keys.  In particular at the place of / there is -  on German
keyboards.

Fortunately the German keyboard offers the ä (a umlaut) key which has no
predefined binding yet.  Since ä is located at a quite comfortable place
(at the place of ') C-ä and M-ä come quite smoothly similar to C-/ and M-/.
Also C-ä and M-ä are very mnemonic representing the two äh's of German:
The correcting one and the mmh-ähh :-)

How can I correctly define M-ä in the most canonical way?

By more or less trial and error I found the following working under 21.3,
and an older 21.2.50 (of April 2002).  It does no more work under the
current 21.3.50 which is not surprising anyway.

To me this seems to be some kind of boot strap problem: In order to
mention ä one needs to be in a Latin-1 language environment etc.  But the
point would be that this key definiton is even present in other environments.

(global-set-key [(control ?\344)] 'undo)
(global-set-key [(meta ?\344)] 'dabbrev-expand)
(global-set-key [(meta shift ?\344)] 'dabbrev-last-expansion)

-- 
Ulrich Neumerkel http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Edi Weitz]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 20:24:44 GMT, ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) wrote:

> On German keyboards many important Emacs commands are not easily
> accessible.  In particular C-/ (undo) and M-/ (dabbrev-expand) are
> very difficult to type (i.e. one types C-Shift-7 or M-Shift-7) thus
> hampering the smooth flow of typing, Emacs users with US-american
> keyboards enjoy.
>
> [...]
>
> How can I correctly define M-ä in the most canonical way?

See this thread:

  <http://www.google.com/groups?threadm=m34r1l4ok8.fsf%40ID-24456.user.dfncis.de>

Edi.

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Kai Grossjohann]

ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:

> On German keyboards many important Emacs commands are not easily
> accessible.

But that's only until you configure your computer to have a US
layout.  With Emacs' input methods I'm able to type " a to get ä, and
I've never looked back.

For Windows, I recommend AllChars.  It requires you to type the Ctrl
key first, but you can configure it for even easier
Ctrl-plus-two-character bindings, such as Ctrl a a or Ctrl a e for ä.
(For AllChars, press Ctrl, then release it, then type the subsequent
keys.)  That way, you have convenient access to umlauts in all Windows
programs.

For Unices, it's not that easy.  Of course there is the Compose key
(Multi_key? Mode_switch?), but it might not be so easy to reach.  I
wish that the functionality of AllChars would be available on Unices
(under X11), too.

Even better would be to have the functionality of the Emacs input
methods -- hitting " a gives me ä, whereas hitting " SPC gives me ".

Kai

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Ulrich Neumerkel]

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Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:
>ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:
>
>> On German keyboards many important Emacs commands are not easily
>> accessible.
>
>But that's only until you configure your computer to have a US
>layout.  With Emacs' input methods I'm able to type " a to get ä, and
>I've never looked back.

Yes, I do this personally on my own machine.

But on places where You have no influence on the configuration
this is an impossibility.  Also many persons are simply used to the
German keyboard layout and will not change for the sake of Emacs.

What is needed is some way to refer portably in plain ascii to any character
in any other encoding.  I.e. something similar to kbd but including
character encoding.

When I nowadays M-x describe-bindings I see so many different encodings.
There should be also a way to refer to these keys in a portable
fashion.

-- 
Ulrich Neumerkel http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Kai Grossjohann]

ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:

> What is needed is some way to refer portably in plain ascii to any
> character in any other encoding.  I.e. something similar to kbd but
> including character encoding.

But a single kbd can only produce a single encoding, right?  Or am I
overlooking something here?

In principle, make-char can help, but it's not wysiwyg.  Hm.

Kai

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Ulrich Neumerkel]

Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:
>ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:
>
>> What is needed is some way to refer portably in plain ascii to any
>> character in any other encoding.  I.e. something similar to kbd but
>> including character encoding.
>
>But a single kbd can only produce a single encoding, right?  Or am I
>overlooking something here?

I agree.  But a single .el should be useable on several keyboards!
The differences between them are minusucle.

>In principle, make-char can help, but it's not wysiwyg.  Hm.

What I currently have are various machines some have US-American keyboards,
some have German keyboards, some French.  I would like to have ONE .el for all
of them.  I cannot change all those labs to use this famous Emacs keyboard 8-).

As it does not hurt to have already so many key-bindings (M-x describe-bindings
to see that already virtually all kinds of inputs are defined) it would seem
to be benificial to have a clean and portable means to refer to all of them
in a single .el which is itself written in just the lowest common denominator
i.e. ASCII.  Certainly it would be equally nice to be able to define
not only keys but just any messages (i.e. strings) for various languages in the
very same file.

The current internationalisation effort seems to stop somewhere when it comes
to defining keys in a uniform manner.

-- 
Ulrich Neumerkel http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Reiner Steib]

On Wed, Dec 17 2003, Kai Grossjohann wrote:

> For Windows, I recommend AllChars.  It requires you to type the Ctrl
> key first, but you can configure it for even easier
> Ctrl-plus-two-character bindings, such as Ctrl a a or Ctrl a e for ä.
> (For AllChars, press Ctrl, then release it, then type the subsequent
> keys.)  That way, you have convenient access to umlauts in all Windows
> programs.
>
> For Unices, it's not that easy.  Of course there is the Compose key
> (Multi_key? Mode_switch?), but it might not be so easy to reach. I
> wish that the functionality of AllChars would be available on Unices
> (under X11), too.

But you can map any key as a compose key using xmodmap, e.g. the
"menu" key or the (right or left) "windows" keys (Super_R, Super_L).
`Compose " a' gives `ä' and so on.  So you have exactly the same as
you described for AllChars or am I missing something?

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
---ooO-(_)-Ooo--- PGP key available via WWW   http://rsteib.home.pages.de/

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Kai Grossjohann]

Reiner Steib <4.uce.03.r.s@nurfuerspam.de> writes:

> But you can map any key as a compose key using xmodmap, e.g. the
> "menu" key or the (right or left) "windows" keys (Super_R, Super_L).
> `Compose " a' gives `ä' and so on.  So you have exactly the same as
> you described for AllChars or am I missing something?

The differences between AllChars and the compose key:

* The compose key and the ctrl key must be different keys.  With
  AllChars, the same key (the ctrl key) is doing double duty.  I have
  lots of ctrl keys on my keyboard, so it is easy to hit them ;-)

* The compose key has a predefined number of combos, such that I must
  always use " a or a " to get ä.  But AllChars is configurable, so
  that I can configure any two-character combination instead of " a
  and a ".  (I configured ctrl a a to produce ä, which is easier to
  type than ctrl a " or ctrl " a.)

Kai

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Kai Grossjohann]

ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:

> To me this seems to be some kind of boot strap problem: In order to
> mention ä one needs to be in a Latin-1 language environment etc.

Well, C-x 8 " a seems easy enough to type if you need that character.

Or, C-u C-\ latin-1-prefix RET " a C-\.

> But the point would be that this key definiton is even present in
> other environments.

Since ä is a Latin-1 character, what's the point of making this "key"
available to non-Latin-1 users?

> (global-set-key [(control ?\344)] 'undo)
> (global-set-key [(meta ?\344)] 'dabbrev-expand)
> (global-set-key [(meta shift ?\344)] 'dabbrev-last-expansion)

;; -*- coding: latin-1; -*-
(global-set-key (kbd "C-ä") 'dabbrev-expand)

Does this work?

Kai

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Ulrich Neumerkel]

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Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:
>ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:
>
>> To me this seems to be some kind of boot strap problem: In order to
>> mention ä one needs to be in a Latin-1 language environment etc.
>
>Well, C-x 8 " a seems easy enough to type if you need that character.

This is not about typing in other characters but referring
to them in .el-Files

>Since ä is a Latin-1 character, what's the point of making this "key"
>available to non-Latin-1 users?
This is more about particular keyboard layouts.

>;; -*- coding: latin-1; -*-
>(global-set-key (kbd "C-ä") 'dabbrev-expand)
>
>Does this work?

Yes, this is definitely better than what I had before,
but it is not what my post was about.
If latin-1 would be everything, then this would be perfect.

If I understand the situation correctly you need for any encoding
you care a separate file to define the appropriate bindings.
Right? The point would be to be able to refer to different
encodings in the same file.

-- 
Ulrich Neumerkel http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/

Re: German keyboard key bindings?

[Kai Grossjohann]

ulrich@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Ulrich Neumerkel) writes:

> Yes, this is definitely better than what I had before,
> but it is not what my post was about.
> If latin-1 would be everything, then this would be perfect.
>
> If I understand the situation correctly you need for any encoding
> you care a separate file to define the appropriate bindings.
> Right? The point would be to be able to refer to different
> encodings in the same file.

I wonder if it would work to use emacs-mule as the encoding.  With
emacs-mule, you could say:

; -*- coding: emacs-mule; -*-
(global-set-key (kbd "ä") 'foo)         ; latin-1 char
(global-set-key (kbd "ä") 'bar)         ; latin-2 char

Here, the two ä characters are intended to be different characters, as
indicated in the comment.  That might do something useful.

Kai