On Mon, 24 Oct 2022 20:57:13 -0700 Ali Corbin <ali.cor...@gmail.com> dijo:
>On Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 8:24 PM Keith Lofstrom <kei...@kl-ic.com> >wrote: ..... > >> Does anyone on the plug list have experience using multiple >> keyboards and alternate character sets? Suggested vendors >> for those keyboards? Helpful Linux tools for linguistic >> cripples? >I regularly switch back and forth between Latin, Cyrillic, and >(ancient) Greek. But I simply switch the layouts, using a single physical >keyboard for each. Which takes some memorization. Since I never >learned to touch-type in Russian, I can use a phonetic Cyrillic >keyboard and mostly press the Latin key that sounds like the Cyrillic >one. I do have to memorize where the extra letters are, or bring up >an image of the keyboard layout, or even bring up the character map >and click the letters into the paste buffer. That's pretty much how I do it for Ancient Greek (polytonic), although I also often use Onboard, which came with Xubuntu. Onboard gives you an on-screen keyboard so you can click on characters. I assigned Shift-Ctrl-Alt to switch between normal US English keyboard and Ancient Greek. When I'm in Ancient Greek the Onboard keys change to Greek, or I can just use the keyboard on my Thinkpad, in which case I have to remember which keys give me which Ancient Greek characters. I could do the same thing for any other language that requires completely non-Latin characters. But I also sometimes write in Spanish, French and German, and for those I just use the Compose key rather than switch to a completely different keyboard. When I enabled the Compose key I assigned it to the Windows key, otherwise useless on Ubuntu. If I want (e.g.) an ä I hold down the Windows key, type a double quote, then the a, and the process gives me an ä. All I have to remember is that a double quote gives me an umlaut, a single quote gives me an acute accent, a back quote produces an accent grave, and an > gives an accent circumflex. There are lots more possibilities, and I have memorized the sequences for a few more, like ß, !, ¿, etc. I also frequently need IPA characters. I could install a special keyboard for them, but over years of using them I find it's faster just to use Ctrl-Shift-u + Unicode hex number. The thing is that IPA characters are needed just as a single character inserted into a paper that is otherwise completely in English. Over the years I've memorized the most frequently used ones, and I made a little popup message tool that displays them when I need one that I haven't memorized. That is, the popup is created by gxmessage, (in the repos) which I call with a little bash script that also loads the text file that contains the data to be displayed. The nice thing about my setup is that I need no extra physical keyboards. I can do everything quickly and easily with the US English keyboard that Lenovo built into my current Thinkpad. And if I travel I need bring no extra baggage in order to have everything available.
