bug#20499: [PROPOSED PATCH] C-x 8 shorthands for curved quotes, , Euro, etc.

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/11/2015 07:54 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> IOW, the above selection is highly filtered using some unspecified rules

Sure, and I expect that what Wikipedia has done is seen which characters 
get used the most, give a trivial UI for the most-commonly used dozen or 
so non-ASCII characters, a simple UI for the most-commonly used 
few-hundred non-ASCII characters, and a more-complex UI for the rest.  
It's a reasonable design approach.

> For example, if you know that the character you are looking for is 
> some form of a Latin 'a', then we could present only those (there are 
> 36 of them in the current UCD). 

That all sounds good, for users who know that there's a way to get that 
list of "A"-like characters.  It would be good also to cater to people 
who are less expert, and who only know something simple like "type the 
Alt-FOO key if you want to type weird characters". Perhaps a top-level 
menu that gives a dozen or so of the most-common characters and also 
says "type an "A" to get the "A"-like letters", and "press this button 
to get Greek", etc.