From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Tianxiang Xiong Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Entering Unicode characters Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:36:57 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: References: <83twmkkv16.fsf@gnu.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1453758055 11290 80.91.229.3 (25 Jan 2016 21:40:55 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 21:40:55 +0000 (UTC) To: emacs-devel@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Mon Jan 25 22:40:48 2016 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1aNosL-0006T9-Lg for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:40:41 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:40896 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aNosL-0006vX-3D for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:40:41 -0500 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:52167) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aNos4-0006uU-1x for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:40:29 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aNort-0007aD-9W for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:40:18 -0500 Original-Received: from plane.gmane.org ([80.91.229.3]:57469) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1aNort-0007a8-2Q for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:40:13 -0500 Original-Received: from list by plane.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1aNorl-00065d-P4 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:40:09 +0100 Original-Received: from pat-verona-d.epic.com ([199.204.56.18]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:40:05 +0100 Original-Received: from tianxiang.xiong by pat-verona-d.epic.com with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Mon, 25 Jan 2016 22:40:05 +0100 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ Original-Lines: 41 Original-X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: sea.gmane.org User-Agent: Loom/3.14 (http://gmane.org/) X-Loom-IP: 199.204.56.18 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: Genre and OS details not recognized. X-Received-From: 80.91.229.3 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:198815 Archived-At: Richard Stallman gnu.org> writes: > > You should be able to get the common ones with the C-x 8 commands that > > work out of the box. > > C-x 8 may be a good replacement for iso-acc, iso-insert, iso-swed. > > "C-x 8 RET" > > should give you any unicode character by name. > > That is useless in practice, because it requires users to know these > long and often obscure names. When I wanted to do this, I was unable > to do it with C-x 8. I was totally stumped! All I could do was try > to find a file which had the character I wanted. > > We need a way to enter any Unicode character that is EASY to use > and does not require using its official name. > Seems to me that this is a problem that should be solved by an incremental completion framework. For example, the "helm-ucs" command from the Helm package provides the following features: - List of all symbols by their proper names in a temporary buffer - Incremental completion; e.g. I can type "Greek theta" and only symbols whose offical names contain the words "Greek" and "theta" are included in the result set. - Preview of symbols (so you can easily see what it looks like and whether it's supported by your font) - Hex character code - Action menu specifying actions to take on a symbo (e.g. insert symbol, copy hex code, etc.) A solution that does not involve the "official" name would only increase the cognitive load for the user because they'd have to know the "unofficial" name and how to map it to the official name. Considering the large number of symbols users may want to insert, this does not seem like a good solution.