Entering Unicode characters by name

Question

Emacs has the insert-char feature: You press a key combination and get a menu containing all Unicode characters with search similar to dmenu and most DE's program launchers.

For example, to enter "∃" (THERE EXISTS), I type <Ctrl-x> 8 <Enter> exists <Enter>.

Is there something similar that works in all X11 programs?

You can use ibus with addon ibus-unicode-db , from github . – Ricardo Wong Apr 10 '18 at 01:07 — Ricardo Wong, Apr 10 '18 at 01:07

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 09 '18 at 02:59

I would think Autokey would do the job as described here. The idea is that Autokey is always running and can accept arbitrary strings as triggers.

As the post describes, you just need to set up Autokey to paste unicode characters and as a trigger it could accept something like /delta, which it then replaces with a δ.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 31 '17 at 08:33

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My feeling is that this is out of the X11 scope, this is desktop environtment business.

For KDE, kcharselect is a tool to pick special characters, including search. It should fit your needs, if you put it on a global shortcut key like I did. Drawback: The chars get copied to the paste buffer, so you need one more keystroke to insert them.

answered May 31 '17 at 08:33

Philippos

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Obviously I don't want such a tool to be part of the X server, but it should work in all graphical programs. – Nova May 31 '17 at 09:08
@Eric Well, that's the case for `kcharselect` for all graphical programs that support the clipboard (which almost all do, I guess). – Philippos May 31 '17 at 09:31
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This is input method business. Input methods are mostly independent of desktop environments. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 31 '17 at 22:37

Entering Unicode characters by name

2 Answers2