2015-06-15 15:20 GMT+02:00 QSJN 4 UKR <[email protected]>: > By the way, about smart quotes. I am using that for long time. My > keyboard layout generates two characters on one key-press (so I have > to enter [«»][←]{sth}[→] instead of [«]{sth}[»]). It's not that good, >
You could generate three keystrokes [«][»][←] from a single keypress to get the same effect. Various editors already do that when you press the first key for the opening quote, and all you have to type then is the [→] key (instead of the key for a closing quote) after typing the word. Such system is used in many IDE or text editors for programmers when they enter the opening parenthese, or square bracket, or single/double quotes, or braces, or block comment prefixes, or any paired symbols or keywords used in the programming language (e.g. "begin | end" in Pascal, "#if |\n#endif" in C/C++ preprocessor directives : the pipe here notes the position of the cursor after typing what is just before it, what is after the pipe is inserted after the cursor position). If you disagree with those automatic insertions after the cursor, you can immediately press CTRL+Z to cancel this added suffix but keep what you just entered. another CTRL+Z will undo your previous keypress(es) for the character(s) just before the cursor position. Some editors are even smarter before the cursor position is not just a single position but a selected range and as long as you continue typing just before this range, the selection is preserved, and when you press [→] it will skip over this whole selection and you an also press then the backspace key to delete that autoinserted selected range. If you move your cursor elsewhere, the selection is unselected and you get back to the normal insertion cursor with an empty selection. Such system is used for example in Notepad++ (for Windows), or Eclipse (you can disable this automatic insertion in your preferences). This editor feature does not depend on the character layout but depends on the selected language for matching pairs: it does not have to be limited to programming languages and can be used as well for natural human languages, including in advanced word processors. It can also be used to insert automatically some additional space when you just press an initial quote: entering only [«] when editing French text, what you would get is [«][NNBSP]|[NNBSP][»] (with the cursor selection over the last two characters). These editors normally have a way to edit their automatic insertion rules (with the text to match before, the text to add jut after it, the new cursor position, and the text to insert just after it (and to hopefully preselect in such a way that when continuing entering text without moving the insertion position, it is not overwritten but just preseves this selected text). Such rules can be part of the parameters for the spell checker.
