RE: how to input Eszett ('ß')?

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

 > I'm currently running GNU Emacs 24.0.91.1 with a US English locale,
> and use `C-x 8` (`M-x ucs-insert`) fairly often, mostly successfully.
> But for 'ß', 
> 
> I tried                                      and got
> -------------------------------------------  -------------------
> C-x 8 ss                                     's'
> C-x 8 RET tsett                              error
> C-x 8 RET eszett                             error
> C-x 8 RET TAB, then searching *Completions*  found nothing 
> 
> finally, following a wikipedia lookup (from which I could have
> just copied the damn thing :-)
> 
> C-x 8 00DF                                   success, but I'll
>                                              never remember that
> How easiest to get this character on a non-German keyboard?

I'm no expert on Unicode or German, to put it mildly. ;-)

The official name you are looking for is `LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S'.  (Don't
ask me why.)  So if you can remember that one (!) then you can do `C-x 8 RET
latin small letter sharp s'.  Completion is available, thankfully.

But you might also have a look at this library:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/download/ucs-cmds.el

It gives you an easy way to create commands to insert specific characters such
as this.  And you can of course rename the commands.  By default, the name of
the command to insert this char would be `latin-small-letter-sharp-s'.

The library provides a macro, to which you pass a regexp string that matches the
char names that you want to create commands for.  If you wanted just one
command, for this char, then you could do this:

(ucs-make-commands "latin small letter sharp s")

Then you can rename the command, if you like.

If you wanted a command for each latin character, you could do this:

(ucs-make-commands "latin")

And so on.