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0 pointspluma8y ago0 comments

If you're on Linux (maybe macOS supports this too?) you can open the keyboard settings and turn one of several keys into the Compose/Multi key (I picked CapsLock because I rarely hit it on accident and don't use it). Then you can type all kinds of weird combinations:

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...

For example, em dash is Compose+minus+minus+minus, en dash is Compose+minus+minus+period.

It's also useful for foreign glyphs like Compose+a+a for the Nordic å, Compose+s+s for German ß (with Shift it becomes ẞ, which the new German orthography rules officially recognise!), Compose+quote+<vowel> for the various umlauts and Compose+i+period for the dotless ı (with Shift it becomes the dotted İ).

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yorwba8y ago

The best way to enter arbitrary Unicode characters on Linux I have found is fcitx's https://fcitx-im.org/Unicode

Just press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U, type (part of) the name of the character and select from the list of results.

— (em dash), ︱ (presentation form for vertical em dash), ⤐ (rightwards two-headed triple-dash arrow), ﷽ (arabic ligature bismillah ar-rahman ar-raheem) are all easy to enter.

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