On a daily basis I use some languages that require non-ascii characters and for the longest time on linux/wayland I’ve struggled to find ways to use these characters.
The Germans characters I’ve just abbreviated:
- ä/ö/ü -> ae/oe/ue
- ß -> ss
For the Spanish ones removed all the extras:
- é/í -> e/i
- ñ -> n
- etc.
And for the Portuguese just the same:
- ã/á/à -> a
Perhaps a bit unorthodox or bad towards the language, but my way to go would be
having a buffer with those in /tmp/ or looking them up on wikipedia and
copying them whenever needed.
But recently I was a bit tired of it and to make new Portuguese flashcards I didn’t want to go use a mac with nice diacritics on macos, so I figured out it may be worth the time to look into how to use a compose key for hyprland.
Turns out it’s as easy as it could be:
input = {
kb_options = compose:ralt;
};
(Semicolons because hyprland is defined in nix, not its own config.)
Since then I have (alt-gr := compose):
“[auo] -> äüö ss -> ß ~[an] -> ãñ ’[aei] -> áéí `[aei] -> àéì
For obvious reasons this makes writing these characters much easier, but on telling a friend about that she shared another good way to do it without key.
Vim’s :dig.
An nix inbuilt way of using special characters. Now I don’t need it anymore because I have the special symbols implemented on a deeper level but would I have known about that earlier I’ve probably not needed it as everything that is longer than two sentences is already written in nvim either way.
But I do recommend giving it a look, it has a huge variety of other alphabets too, most notably for the daily use is the Greek to maybe refer to mathematics, a theorem or a such.
Can recommend, have fun.