Re: Entering Unicode characters

[Tianxiang Xiong]

Richard Stallman <rms <at> gnu.org> writes:

>   > 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.
> 

Seems to me that this is a problem that should be solved by an 
incremental completion framework.

For example, the "helm-ucs" command from the Helm package provides the 
following features:

- List of all symbols by their proper names in a temporary buffer
- Incremental completion; e.g. I can type "Greek theta" and only symbols 
whose offical names contain the words "Greek" and "theta" are included 
in the result set.
- Preview of symbols (so you can easily see what it looks like and 
whether it's supported by your font)
- Hex character code
- Action menu specifying actions to take on a symbo (e.g. insert symbol, 
copy hex code, etc.)

A solution that does not involve the "official" name would only increase 
the cognitive load for the user because they'd have to know the 
"unofficial" name and how to map it to the official name. Considering 
the large number of symbols users may want to insert, this does not seem 
like a good solution.