Re: Entering Unicode characters

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2016-01-25, at 16:37, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

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>
>   > You should be able to get the common ones with the C-x 8 commands that
>   > work out of the box.
>
> C-x 8 may be a good replacement for iso-acc, iso-insert, iso-swed.
>
>                          "C-x 8 RET"
>   > should give you any unicode character by name.
>
> That is useless in practice, because it requires users to know these
> long and often obscure names.  When I wanted to do this, I was unable
> to do it with C-x 8.  I was totally stumped!  All I could do was try
> to find a file which had the character I wanted.
>
> We need a way to enter any Unicode character that is EASY to use
> and does not require using its official name.

Have you heard about autocompletion?

Sorry, could not resist.  In fact, I agree that C-x 8 RET with stock
Emacs is not the best experience, but either Icicles (which I used
previously) or Ivy (which I use now) make it much, much better.  Icicles
especially, since it displays the characters next to their names.  Ivy
is much faster, OTOH.

For instance, I can type

™ using C-x 8 RET trade RET
© using C-x 8 RET copyr <down> RET
💩 using C-x 8 RET poo RET (though, fortunately, my font does not support
this)

etc.

Also, TeX input method.  I have it as my default-input-method, and it's
really great, provided one is fluent in TeX (I am, quite).

And, do you think that something like a character table, divided into
categories, might be useful?

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University