On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 03:19:25PM EDT, A.J.Mechelynck wrote: > cga2000 wrote: > >I sometimes need to write text in other languages such as French, > >Spanish and occasionally German or Italian. > > > >I would like to do this in Vim. > > > >Unfortunately I only have a US keyboard. > > [..] > I. > > Since you've already used digraphs, and they're too cumbersome for you, > you could try a keymap. > > There are some keymaps in $VIMRUNTIME/keymap which you can apply by just > doing ":setlocal keymap=<keymapname>" (where <keymapname> is the > filename without the encoding and .vim endings) or by using the "Edit -> > Keymap" menu. Then you can toggle between "US-QWERTY" mode and "keymap" > mode by hitting Ctrl-^ in Insert mode, or by toggling 'iminsert' between > zero and 1 in any mode. Basically, what a keymap does is establish a set > of language-mappings, i.e., insert-mode mappings which can be turned on > an off. Try the "accents" keymap, it might be just what you want. > This works great..! I tried that on a short text in French and within a couple of minutes I was almost as comfortable as I am when typing in English. The accents are all perfectly intuitive - ` ' ^ etc. so I didn't even need to look at the keymap. Just need to be a little patient when entering an apostrophe.
Only minor glitch seems to be that text doesn't wrap when in "INSERT (lang)" mode.. haven't figured out why yet.. so I just escape out of insert mode and do a "gqip" once in a while. Could be unrelated though.. > Or, if none of the distributed keymaps is exactly what you want, you can > write your own. It isn't hard. See ":help :loadkeymap" for the theory, > and look at the contents of Bram's $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/accents.vim and my > $VIMRUNTIME/keymap/esperanto_utf8.vim for a couple of simple examples. > You might want to write something more extensive but this will show you > how to do it. > Doesn't look like much is missing.. Maybe the French o+e .. but then my screen font doesn't have it either.. > If and when you write your own keymap, place it in the keymap/ > subdirectory of a directory listed early in 'runtimepath' but not in > $VIMRUNTIME/keymap itself because any upgrade can silently change > anything there. > > > > II. What you are suggesting looks like setting 'spelllang' (with three > ells) to whatever means "French" and then spellchecking your > US-ASCII-only text. But beware: the Vim spellchecker (which I don't > use because of my good innate spelling) might not be clever enough to > mark words which have accented homographs, such as "a" ("has") vs. "à" > ("at"), "de" ("of") vs. "dé" ("thimble"), "du" ("of the") vs. "dû" > ("owed"), "cru" ("believed" or "raw") vs. "crû" ("grown") etc.: so the > cure might be worse than the ill, owing to the necessity of looking > for unmarked spelling mistakes even after running the spell checker. > I think you're right. Considering how effective the keymap solution is there's just no point. Anyway, I don't even have an active spellchecker at this point. aspell segfaults for some reason and I haven't had time to research that yet. Just need to figure out how I can get latex to handle these non-ASCII characters. They disappear from the .dvi file. In case I can't figure it out, there's probably a latex user list somewhere. Great Tip..! Thanks cga