On Wed, May 20, 2020 at 01:13:10PM -0700, Mike Miller wrote: > > On 2020-05-20 00:44, Chris Angelico wrote: > >If you think that a keyboard with fancy arrows on it will take off any > >quicker, you're extremely hopeful. > > While I'm not sure how useful this is in the long run, the oft mentioned > drawback of "hard to type/view" Unicode chars isn't as insurmountable as > some think: > > - Word processors have had a palette to insert symbols for decades.
Not everyone is programming in a GUI environment all the time, and even when they are, GUI "insert symbol palettes" are of greatly variable quality. > - Editors have had "snippets" for perhaps almost as long. Sure, but like the "insert symbol" command, needing to use a snippet adds friction. Even in the best case, think of the difference between: * type a minus sign `-` * use a snippet or symbol palette to find and insert a `→` symbol. > - Code formatters such as "go fmt", yapf, black, etc could update them. > - All maintained OSs support a great majority of Unicode, with font support. Which is still patchy, but getting better. I still come across monospaced fonts where certain symbols have annoying "off by one pixel" display bugs, or are missing the exact symbol you need. I use a lot of arrows in my maths equations, and they are invariably too small, too big or placed too close to the baseline, depending on the font. At smaller font sizes, the arrow head tends to look like "grit on the monitor". In a word processor, I can manually tweak that, but in a programming environment using a text editor, there's not much I can do except search for that One Perfect Font. Still not found it after decades of searching. > - AltGr and Compose keys are available. And require the editor or OS to support it, a keyboard to have the right compose key, and most importantly of all, for the user to remember a bunch of esoteric key codes to get the symbol needed. I can remember Win key .. to give MIDDLE DOT · but it's the wrong dot, I need DOT PRODUCT ⋅ (which unfortunately is displayed as a missing- character glyph in my email client and editor). But I have no idea what key combination I need to press to get DOT PRODUCT. Last night I had one of my students ask me how they are supposed to type maths symbols during an online test if they can't google for it and copy it from some website. I didn't have an answer. So what is the key code for the → symbol? > I've been using Unicode everywhere for about a decade—it's time to retire > the argument that input is still hard or rare. I can sincerely say that I am very happy that your experience is so good, but I'm also exceedingly jealous of it. I don't think your experience scales to the majority of people. -- Steven _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/C3GEUDZ7KAQKYHA345MGQJAXVHEZP4FY/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
