Conkey VS wincompose

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

For a ~50-year-old program, Emacs’s support for multilingual input — and really, it’s all-round flexibility — continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but I’d happily use Emacs’s own input methods if that would be sufficient.

(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support… I’ve used ‘unicode-fonts’ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesn’t work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, it’s at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)

Touche compose. Natif sous linux, et sous windows : https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

Julia has made symbol input manageable and lets you define infix operators for many of the Unicode symbols that make sense for that. [1] And JuliaMono was designed to support the symbols that Julia does. [2]

I generally do quite fine with my Compose Key configuration, though (even on Windows, where I use WinCompose). [3]

[1]: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/unicode-input/

[2]: https://juliamono.netlify.app/

[3]: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

On Windows, I use http://wincompose.info/ for all my special-character needs (and use the system compose key on Linux).

na windowsa jest sobie WinCompose

Credit to wincompose's GUI for inspiration, which provides similar functionality on Windows.

I’ve previously used a nice little tool called WinCompose for exactly that. Looks like it’s still going:

http://wincompose.info/

Malgré to, yo recomanda WinCompose o simil si tu es in Windows.

I use WinCompose which gives me the same compose-key functionality that's built into Linux. I've chosen one key on my keyboard to be the Compose key (I use Right-Alt, but you can pick any key that's convenient). Then I can type

Assuming you are on desktop/laptop:

The long-winded way is to use your OS's character map tool: find the glyph you want there and copy+paste. Under Windows 10+ there is the emoji keyboard (hit [win]+;) which also gives access to much more including super-/sub- script characters, which is a little more convenient than character map. Presumably other OSs have similar available too.

Better is to have support for a compose key sequence. Usually build in to Linux & similar, you just might have to find the setting to turn it on and configure what your compose key is. Under Windows I use http://wincompose.info/ and there are a couple of similar tools out there. In any case it is useful for more than super- and sub-scripts: accented characters & similar (áàäæçffñ), some fractions (¼,½,¾), other symbols (°∞™®↑↓←→‽¡¿⸘♥⋘»‱), and configurable too so you can make what you use most easiest to access (and if you are really sad like me you can do something https://xkcd.com/2583/ to type hallelujah too!).