Also for vim users who aren't aware of this: vim has a convenient way to enter common special characters in the form of [1]digraphs which you can enter by pressing ctrl-k in insert mode. You have to learn the digraph for the symbol, but they are pretty mnemonic in their assignment (e.g 'C(' -> ⊂, 'm*' -> μ, 's*' -> σ, 'Fm' -> ♀), and honestly, you wouldn't be using vim if you weren't into maximizing efficiency by learning short cryptic commands.
On Thu, May 22, 2014, at 12:03 PM, Miguel Bazdresch wrote: In vim, you can do something like imap \alpha<TAB> <C-V>u03b1 to reproduce this behavior. -- mb On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 1:27 PM, Steven G. Johnson <[2]stevenj....@gmail.com> wrote: A quick update for people who haven't been tracking git closely: The Julia REPL (#6911), IJulia, and (soon) Emacs julia-mode (#6920) now allows you to type many mathematical Unicode characters simply by typing the LaTeX symbol and hitting TAB. e.g. you can type \alpha<TAB> and get α, or x\hat<TAB> and get x̂. There are currently 736 supported symbols (though not all of them are valid in Julia identifiers). This should provide a consistent, cross-platform Julian idiom for entering Unicode math. Hopefully this can also be added to other popular editors at some point, e.g. presumably vim can be programmed to do this, and there is a somewhat similar mode for Sublime ([3]https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath). (Less-programmable editors might need source-level patches, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable patch to suggest.) References 1. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/digraph.html 2. mailto:stevenj....@gmail.com 3. https://github.com/mvoidex/UnicodeMath