> We can clean this up with “abbreviations” (:h abbreviations): It’s probably almost a decade since I last used an abbreviation; I consistently found I just di

> We can clean this up with “abbreviations” (:h abbreviations): It’s probably almost a decade since I last used an abbreviation; I consistently found I just didn’t quite like them, and migrated to other ways of doing things. It was digraphs at first, still a Vim feature, and then Compose key sequences, which is where I’ve stayed ever since, preferring them mostly because they work everywhere, not just Vim. Now I type apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and other interesting things as I go perfectly casually, and would hate to be without a Compose key. (I’ve typed every non-ASCII character in this comment with my Compose key—just as well I still remembered · even though I practically never use it any more.) > You can use x and o as well, but × (U+00D7, MULTIPLICATION SIGN) and · (U+00B7, MIDDLE DOT) are more … gourmet. I’d go more gourmet than that: I use • (U+2022 BULLET) and ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2713 CHECK MARK) for lists. If you really wanted a cross, you could also go with ‹ugh, gobbled by HN› (U+2717 BALLOT X). The ordering holds, either way: 0x2022 < 0x2713, though I cringe at unbridled sorting of these lines. (I do all my own writing in a lightweight markup language I’ve been developing, one property of which is that it leans on CSS Counter Styles for lists for spectacular matching of source and compiled result, so that you can write “(i) ”, “17. ”, “• ”, “‹CHECK MARK› ”, &c. and get matching appearance in the HTML output—or will, when I finally get round to finishing the parser and implementing HTML conversion. I write lists with mingled •, and bullets and it’s great.) Anyway: back to the abbreviations matter: you could also enter all these characters with digraphs (CTRL-K …) or Compose key sequences (Compose …, but since your keyboard lacks a Compose key you’ll need to map one—I use RAlt on my current laptop because that’s conveniently positioned, but I really wish my spacebar was just split into at least three keys): • · is digraph .M or ~. and Compose sequence .- or .^ or ^. • × is digraph *X or /\ and Compose sequence xx • • is digraph oo and Compose sequence .= • ‹CHECK MARK› is digraph OK and a popular Compose sequence is @/ (present in kragen’s list, as included out of the box by WinCompose, but not standard on other platforms) • ‹BALLOT X› is digraph XX and a popular Compose sequence is @X You can define your own Vim digraphs too (:digraph), and make your own ~/.XCompose to set your own Compose sequences.