I’ve noticed that most applications that I care about—Vim, Python, xterm, …—now support Unicode. So I started asking myself, “Why aren’t I more picky about text?” I would whine about the temperature this April ranging from "20-79 degrees" rather than “20–79 °F” because entering Unicode was so much harder than displaying it. Well, I found a more efficient way to enter Unicode, and others might find it useful, so here’s my 2¢ (or €0.013).
GNOME has a fancy little applet called Character Palette. It gives you
a row of characters in your GNOME panel. If you click on one of the
characters, it is placed in your clipboard and can be pasted into an
application by middle-clicking. It also has a pulldown menu that lets
you select another row of characters. If you hover the mouse over a
character, it shows the Unicode name, which makes it easy to distinguish
between MULTIPLICATION SIGN (×) and VECTOR OR CROSS PRODUCT (⨯) and
other visually ambiguous pairs.
Unfortunately, the default character tables in Character Palette are
useless to me. They have tons of stuff I don’t care about, and almost
nothing that I do. So I went to the Character Map (in Accessories) and
to some helpful web pages and made a list of useful characters. I then
added the following commands to my .xsession file (although you could
just plop the values in the right place in the Character Palette
Preferences dialog.
Anyway I’m curious whether any of you know of any important or useful
characters that are not included in my lists (mine are obviously
math-heavy). I am also curious about what alternatives you all use for
entering Unicode.
punctuation="•‘’“”…°′″‴–—"
subsuper="₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹"
operators="±−×÷∕√⋅⨯∞∂∫∇∆"
relations="≠≡≤≥∼≈∝"
logical="¬∧∨⊕⇒⇔∀∃∴∵∎"
sets="∅ℝℕℚ∩∪∖∈∉⊂⊃⊄⊆⊇⊊"
greek_small1="αβγδεζηθικλμ"
greek_small2="νξοπρστυφχψω"
greek_cap="ΓΔΘΛΠΣΦΨΩ"
serbian_latin="ĆćČčĐđLjljNjnjŽžDždžŠš"
misc="éñ€¢©®¼½¾⅓⅔⁄"
sublist1="[$punctuation,$subsuper,$operators,$relations,$logical,$sets,"
sublist2="$greek_small1,$greek_small2,$greek_cap,"
sublist3="$serbian_latin,$misc]"
gconftool-2 -t list --list-type string -s \
/apps/panel/applets/charpicker/prefs/chartable \
"$sublist1$sublist2$sublist3"
gconftool-2 -t string -s \
/apps/panel/applets/charpicker/prefs/current_list "$punctuation"
--
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868
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