Re: Inputting characters with specialist diacritic marks in emacs

["B. T. Raven" <btraven@nihilo.net>]

By far the easiest and mnemonically most intuitive way of inserting 
exotic glyphs is with an input method. If you put this line:

(fset 'im-lat
    [?\C-x return ?\C-\\ ?l ?a ?t ?i ?n ?- ?p ?o ?s ?t ?f ?i ?x return])

into your .emacs you can invoke the latin-postfix method with M - im-lat 
and have access to å ä ö Å Ä Ö plus about 180 other diacritic 
combinations from all the languages of Europe that use the Latin 
alphabet, and including £  ¥  €

then you can toggle back and forth to and from your previous input 
method with C-\

If you need something really exotic, you can accomplish that with e. g.:
(global-set-key "\C-cI" (lambda () (interactive)  (insert  ?‽)))
;;;; interrobang

Ed

P.S.  When will Emacs support a ring or stack of input method 
invocations by the C-\ keychord?


On 1/19/2016 1:45 PM, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> mikew2801@gmail.com writes:
>
>> (global-set-key (kbd "C-c y") (lambda () (interactive)
>> (insert "ñ"))) ...
>>
>> This is not ideal since it's quite difficult to type
>> these bindings.
>
> Do you mean it is difficult/tedious to hit those
> keystrokes or do you mean it is a lot of work setting
> them up?
>
> If it is difficult/tedious, come up with better
> shortcuts! (But `C-c y' is fine in that sense what
> I can see.)
>
> If it is a lot of work setting it up, either use
> kill/yank, or write a script to automatize it if you
> have several hundred such chars - but if you do,
> you'll have to come up with a more refined keyboard
> scheme as well otherwise the shortcuts will be
> depleted before long...
>
>> In Linux I use Ibus mappings which involve
>> double-tapping a similar key (e.g., when I type
>> "a-a" I get "ā", when I type "i-i" I get "ī" and
>> so on.
>
> Yes, this is the best solution, to have a
> *compose key* which works in Linux in general and in
> Emacs the exact same way (with Emacs running on Linux,
> of course).
>
> For example, I, as a programmer, am so used to coding
> and writing (in English). So I want the Anglo-American
> keyboard layout for both purposes. But when I write in
> Swedish, which I do say once a day - even tho it is
> a 100th or so of all my writing - it is a small part
> but not small enough to be neglected, *then*, I still
> cannot use the Swedish layout, as that would bring
> havoc to my brain as so many chars would change place
> on the keyboard. Still (again) I need the å, ä, and
> ö chars which are in the Swedish alphabet but not
> the English.
>
> The solution is the compose key, which in the
> Linux VTs (the ttys, or "the console") are setup like
> I show soon. But, you probably don't use the ttys, so
> I show this just to illustrate the principle. In X,
> you can do the same, of course, just not the same way.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Relevant part from: /etc/console-setup/remap.inc
>
> Whole file: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/conf/remap.inc
>
> ### compose key
> ##
> ## To make the compose key work,
> ## see the setting in /etc/default/keyboard
> ## if that doesn't work, use showkey(1)
> ## to get the desired keycode, and:
>
> keycode 125 = Compose
>
> ## setup the combinations one by one;
> ## output current state with 'dumpkeys --compose-only' [1]
>
> ## [1] for these to work in a tmux session, use:
> ##     $ sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/showkey # ditto /bin/dumpkeys
>
> compose '"'  'A' to U+00C4 # Ä
> compose '"'  'a' to U+00E4 # ä
> compose '"'  'O' to U+00D6 # Ö
> compose '"'  'o' to U+00F6 # ö
> compose '"'  'U' to U+00DC # Ü
> compose '"'  'u' to U+00FC # ü
> compose '/'  'A' to U+00C1 # Á
> compose '/'  'a' to U+00E1 # á
> compose '/'  'E' to U+00C9 # É
> compose '/'  'e' to U+00E9 # é
> compose '/'  'I' to U+00CD # Í
> compose '/'  'i' to U+00ED # í
> compose '/'  'O' to U+00D3 # Ó
> compose '/'  'o' to U+00F3 # ó
> compose '/'  'U' to U+00DA # Ú
> compose '/'  'u' to U+00FA # ú
> compose '0'  'A' to U+00C5 # Å
> compose '0'  'a' to U+00E5 # å
> compose '\\' 'A' to U+00C0 # À
> compose '\\' 'a' to U+00E0 # à
> compose 'o'  'A' to U+00C5 # Å
> compose 'o'  'a' to U+00E5 # å
>