3 ms·

As a french and a developer and a resident of Germany, I have a lot of special characters to write :p I found my peace using qwerty + compose key to make cedil

As a french and a developer and a resident of Germany, I have a lot of special characters to write :p I found my peace using qwerty + compose key to make cedilla, accents, umlauts and more.

lkuty 5y ago
I am french speaking person and a programmer. I switched a year ago to qwerty and wish I had done so decades ago because the shortcuts in programs are conceived for qwert keyboards. I use karabiner and goku under macOS to produce accented characters. It is sufficiently fast to be usable.
Freak_NL 5y ago
Same here. I'm Dutch, but write English (obviously) and occasionally German and a little Frisian (for place and street names on OpenStreetMap). Once you get used to the compose key all keyboards sold with the basic US layout suddenly just work fine, which incidentally — as a programmer — suits me just fine. Any new layout is basically dead on arrival except for a few keyboard geeks. Commercial viability (as in, keyboards sold with that layout and correct keycaps) is essentially zero unless a government mandates its use. The latter is not likely in countries like France. Making the compose-key (usually assigned to the right alt) more popular and better supported is probably the most effective way of enabling the input of letters like É, —, œ, Å, ç, ß, and € on desktop operating systems.
- oezi 5y ago
  I wonder why CAPS isn't used more as a compose key. It is easier to reach than Alt+gr.
colanderman 5y ago
I miss using Linux as my daily driver because its compose key support was unsurpassed. Easy to set up and to add sequences if the mood strikes you. Beyond simple accent marks, it could handle arrows, basic smileys, and even the Greek letter pi. Meanwhile on macOS Big Sur, Karabiner seems to no longer work correctly (and was a royal pain to set up besides), the US International layout doesn't include a proper compose key (it just turns all punctuation keys into dead keys), and the dead keys don't even make all basic combinations (e.g. Polish "ć" or Esperanto "ĉ"). Seriously, Apple had to go out of their way to screw this up! Just tack the Unicode modifier character (e.g. U+0301) onto the end and run Unicode normalization! I get that you don't want this when you have dead keys doubling as normal keys, but dedicated dead keys (e.g. Alt+E) should just always create the character you're asking of them. Just let me set one of my modifier keys to a proper extensible compose key!!

As a french and a developer and a resident of Germany, I have a lot of special characters to write :p I found my peace using qwerty + compose key to make cedilla, accents, umlauts and more.

lkuty 5y ago

I am french speaking person and a programmer. I switched a year ago to qwerty and wish I had done so decades ago because the shortcuts in programs are conceived for qwert keyboards. I use karabiner and goku under macOS to produce accented characters. It is sufficiently fast to be usable.

Freak_NL 5y ago

Same here. I'm Dutch, but write English (obviously) and occasionally German and a little Frisian (for place and street names on OpenStreetMap). Once you get used to the compose key all keyboards sold with the basic US layout suddenly just work fine, which incidentally — as a programmer — suits me just fine. Any new layout is basically dead on arrival except for a few keyboard geeks. Commercial viability (as in, keyboards sold with that layout and correct keycaps) is essentially zero unless a government mandates its use. The latter is not likely in countries like France. Making the compose-key (usually assigned to the right alt) more popular and better supported is probably the most effective way of enabling the input of letters like É, —, œ, Å, ç, ß, and € on desktop operating systems.

oezi 5y ago
I wonder why CAPS isn't used more as a compose key. It is easier to reach than Alt+gr.

colanderman 5y ago

I miss using Linux as my daily driver because its compose key support was unsurpassed. Easy to set up and to add sequences if the mood strikes you. Beyond simple accent marks, it could handle arrows, basic smileys, and even the Greek letter pi. Meanwhile on macOS Big Sur, Karabiner seems to no longer work correctly (and was a royal pain to set up besides), the US International layout doesn't include a proper compose key (it just turns all punctuation keys into dead keys), and the dead keys don't even make all basic combinations (e.g. Polish "ć" or Esperanto "ĉ"). Seriously, Apple had to go out of their way to screw this up! Just tack the Unicode modifier character (e.g. U+0301) onto the end and run Unicode normalization! I get that you don't want this when you have dead keys doubling as normal keys, but dedicated dead keys (e.g. Alt+E) should just always create the character you're asking of them. Just let me set one of my modifier keys to a proper extensible compose key!!