3 ms·

macOS offers three ways to input. One by holding the key (which it inherited from iOS), one through changing the keyboard to another locale, and one by language

by tgv 4y ago

macOS offers three ways to input. One by holding the key (which it inherited from iOS), one through changing the keyboard to another locale, and one by language independent prefixes: alt-u for umlaut/dieresis, alt-e for accent aigu, etc.

JadeNB 4y ago
Unfortunately, neither the first nor the last way is customiseable (and I consider changing the locale pretty brute-force …), or at least not according to the Mac experts I asked when I did a deep dive (which, to be fair, was long ago, before iOS even existed). You can always use the Unicode picker, but, if you never use, say, Opt-Z for Ω and want to re-bind it to something else, or if you wish the 'o' long-press menu included ő … too bad! (I admit I am engaging in the rhetorical tactic of confidently asserting that something is impossible in the hopes that someone will be lured to come along and correct me, so that I can be happily wrong.)
- tgv 4y ago
  There used to be a way to define your own keyboard decoding, but I don't know if you still can, nor how flexible it is. I'm guessing it won't be Turing complete.
  - b3morales 4y ago
    I'm not sure if it's the method you're referring to, but I believe custom keybinding dicts still work. For those interested, this should tell you all you need to know: http://web.archive.org/web/20210130012801/http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html http://web.archive.org/web/20210130012801/http://www.hcs.har...
    - dunham 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm using this for λ and ∀: /* -*- coding: utf-8 -*- */ { "~/" = ("insertText:", "λ"); "~a" = ("insertText:", "∀ "); } It looks like you can actually send arbitrary objectiveC messages to the first responder with this, but I haven't played with it much. (I'm also now using the `fn` key to toggle between greek and US.)
- BlackFingolfin 4y ago
  You can do so by defining a custom keyboard layout. This is quite convenient with Ukelele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ : you can take any existing layout (e.g. the one that is currently active) and then change all key mappings, including which keys are dead keys etc. I used this to create a modified EN-US keymap where Alt-A/O/U produces the corresponding umlaut versions directly, and Alt-S produces German ß (so that when I have to write German text I can do so quickly and conveniently)
  - spudlyo 4y ago
    Ukulele is great! It’s also handy for disabling the default language independent Alt-letter sequences that generate umlauted characters. This way you can have Emacs style meta key cursor movement bindings in macOS text widgets. For me M-f and M-b are indispensable.

by tgv 4y ago

JadeNB 4y ago

Unfortunately, neither the first nor the last way is customiseable (and I consider changing the locale pretty brute-force …), or at least not according to the Mac experts I asked when I did a deep dive (which, to be fair, was long ago, before iOS even existed). You can always use the Unicode picker, but, if you never use, say, Opt-Z for Ω and want to re-bind it to something else, or if you wish the 'o' long-press menu included ő … too bad! (I admit I am engaging in the rhetorical tactic of confidently asserting that something is impossible in the hopes that someone will be lured to come along and correct me, so that I can be happily wrong.)

tgv 4y ago
There used to be a way to define your own keyboard decoding, but I don't know if you still can, nor how flexible it is. I'm guessing it won't be Turing complete.
- b3morales 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's the method you're referring to, but I believe custom keybinding dicts still work. For those interested, this should tell you all you need to know: http://web.archive.org/web/20210130012801/http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html http://web.archive.org/web/20210130012801/http://www.hcs.har...
  - dunham 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm using this for λ and ∀: /* -*- coding: utf-8 -*- */ { "~/" = ("insertText:", "λ"); "~a" = ("insertText:", "∀ "); } It looks like you can actually send arbitrary objectiveC messages to the first responder with this, but I haven't played with it much. (I'm also now using the `fn` key to toggle between greek and US.)
BlackFingolfin 4y ago
You can do so by defining a custom keyboard layout. This is quite convenient with Ukelele https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ https://software.sil.org/ukelele/ : you can take any existing layout (e.g. the one that is currently active) and then change all key mappings, including which keys are dead keys etc. I used this to create a modified EN-US keymap where Alt-A/O/U produces the corresponding umlaut versions directly, and Alt-S produces German ß (so that when I have to write German text I can do so quickly and conveniently)
- spudlyo 4y ago
  Ukulele is great! It’s also handy for disabling the default language independent Alt-letter sequences that generate umlauted characters. This way you can have Emacs style meta key cursor movement bindings in macOS text widgets. For me M-f and M-b are indispensable.