Special Characters on Fedora 17 Gnome 3 - Make Caps Lock a "Compose" Key
I would like to type special characters - for example À la recherche du temps perdu or Du côté de chez Swann.
There are a LOT of methods to do this on Linux up to and including memorizing the unicode hex codes for each accented character and escaping these with ctrl-shift-U. Sorry, not going to go there - that's too much like work.
But many of the other methods involve using the ALT or Windows or CTRL keys as modifiers and again - sorry - I need those for all sorts of other uses.
What seems like a decent solution - at least for me - is to use the Caps Lock key which up until now I had disabled on Linux. One can turn this into a "compose key" and you simply hit Caps Lock, then for example hit the back tick key, and then the "e" and you have composed è. Seems easy enough to remember, easy enough to type, and doesn't muck with my Xemacs, my Gnome Shell, my VNC etc. etc.
To do this all that's needed is System Settings | Region and Language | Layouts | Options | Compose Key Position and then select Caps Lock.
Here's a table of GTK compose codes and the Unicode Hex Codes.
There are a LOT of methods to do this on Linux up to and including memorizing the unicode hex codes for each accented character and escaping these with ctrl-shift-U. Sorry, not going to go there - that's too much like work.
But many of the other methods involve using the ALT or Windows or CTRL keys as modifiers and again - sorry - I need those for all sorts of other uses.
What seems like a decent solution - at least for me - is to use the Caps Lock key which up until now I had disabled on Linux. One can turn this into a "compose key" and you simply hit Caps Lock, then for example hit the back tick key, and then the "e" and you have composed è. Seems easy enough to remember, easy enough to type, and doesn't muck with my Xemacs, my Gnome Shell, my VNC etc. etc.
To do this all that's needed is System Settings | Region and Language | Layouts | Options | Compose Key Position and then select Caps Lock.
Here's a table of GTK compose codes and the Unicode Hex Codes.
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