:: choice ::

random good link:
CliniClowns

random evil link:
Ku Klux Klan

random quote:
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Donald Knuth

Special characters with US keyboard.

I'm using a US keyboard layout on my machine, since that's the most hack-friendly one I can actually grok and type blindly on. Often, however I need to type special characters, such as € or letters with a diaresis on top, such as ü (useful to type my own name ;-)). Those should be easy to type for me as well. What I did is to modify my keymap slightly, so that I can use the Right ALT key (ALT Gr on some keyboards), and get the correct character just by typing Right ALT + a for example to get an ä). The 5 key already has € printed on it, so I'm using Right ALT + 5 to type the Euro sign.

I've saved the following settings into a file called ~/.Xmodmap-Umlaut and when logging in, I'm just running a small script

    #!/bin/sh

    xmodmap /home/sebas/.Xmodmap.Umlaut

which reads the following file:

    keysym  u    = u U udiaeresis      Udiaeresis
    keysym  a    = a A adiaeresis      Adiaeresis
    keysym  o    = o O odiaeresis      Odiaeresis
    keysym  e    = e E ediaeresis      Ediaeresis
    keysym  i    = i I idiaeresis      Idiaeresis

    keysym  s    = s S ssharp
    keysym  5    = 5 percent EuroSign

Now this is probably not the 100% correct way to do it (email me suggestions for improvements :)), but it Gets The Job Done and works ergonomically well enough for me. In case you're getting errors, try replacing ISO_Level3_Shift with whatever "xev" reports as (keysym 0xff7e, Mode_switch) when you capture the Right Alt key with it (or map it to anything you like in the same way).

[ Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:05:55 +0200 ] permanent link

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