I’ve been in a bit of a coding slump recently due to a constellation of work and personal Stuff™, and in situations like those I enjoy procrastinating by tweaking my desktop setup (do kids still call this ricing?).
One of the small things that’s always annoyed me is that, if I want to input the glorious currency symbol of our great monetary union, I basically need to search for “eur symbol” somewhere and copy-paste it. On a Mac with the Dutch layout, the € symbol can be produced by hitting Option + 2, but on my Linux desktop with the nl(mac) layout1, the closest thing is Right Command + 2 (interpreted by the system as AltGr+2), which gives me a nice ².
In skimming through various docs, forum posts and wiki pages, I ran into an xkb option to change the behaviour for the € symbol specifically, but I also ran into something far more interesting: the Compose key. It turns out that there’s a special key you can use to write custom symbols as a sequence of normal keystrokes.
Neat :D
That’s not the only feature: if you place a file named .XCompose in your home directory, you can add custom combinations! So, if I want to send a heart, I can just hit Compose < 3 and I will get a ♥. Besides emoji, I also find myself often looking up various arrows and punctuation: now I can simply hit Compose - > and get a nice → arrow quickly.
Ohhh, that’s awesome! There are a few characters I continuously use the Gnome Character Dictionary for.
It’s also neat for math symbols.
