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Last year, when I suddenly had to teach symbol-heavy stuff over the internet, I put together a tool for this because my handwriting is just too bad with a mouse
by ht_th 5y ago
Last year, when I suddenly had to teach symbol-heavy stuff over the internet, I put together a tool for this because my handwriting is just too bad with a mouse or even a tablet. I wanted to be able to "live" calculate with symbols while I talked over it with my students.
I called this tool √𝚎𝚍, the rich Unicode text editing suite (RUTED, pronounced ˈruːtɪd) and I use it in vim: https://gitlab.com/ruted/ruted-vim https://gitlab.com/ruted/ruted-vim.
I first defined so called modes of ASCII sequences representing Unicode symbols, like "forall" for "∀", and "NN" for "ℕ", and ";o" for "∘". Then I created a very small vim plugin to enable modes and change modes. When in a mode, you can enter the ASCII sequences, and they are replaced by their Unicode equivalent.
It is a bit of a simple hack, but it worked great over the past year. Entering symbols has become very easy for me now.
- scrollaway 5y agoI'm surprised you didn't go the xcompose route! Was this an explicit choice or just didn't know about it?
- ht_th 5y agoYes, I wanted to build something that my students using Windows or Mac OS also could easily use. And I wanted to build a web extension for Firefox and Chrome using the same format. And maybe integrate it in some other tools we're using here as well. Of course, that was too ambitious and the only thing I ended up with was an integration in vim. And that could have been done easier, as your sibling posters have pointed out. Anyway, it was fun to build and very useful the past year.
- idle_zealot 5y agoYou could accomplish this globally with a Composefile on Linux, AutoHotKey script on Windows, or custom abbreviations on Mac.
- ttt0 5y agovim has digraphs and it does the same thing.