Suggestion: Quicker symbol selection

[greywatcher]

As the program functions now, the latest used symbol is very quick to access, but not the others. It would be great if it was also possible to assign each symbol a secondary key press for quick access. For example: CapsLock + p followed by i for π CapsLock + a followed by e for æ CapsLock + a followed by ' for á

[Darthagnon]

I'll see what I can do, though I have a feeling that this might be beyond the scope of this project (the behaviour you describe is more like a Compose key, whereas this is more of a menu of alternate characters per key)

• SymWin: Menu of accented characters per key (though, I agree, adding "Compose" functions to this would make it better and faster)
• WinCompose: exactly the behaviour you describe: press Caps Lock (or whatever you have mapped as a compose key), followed by a : for ä (NB for it to work as expected, be sure to enable WinCompose >> Options >> Tweaks >> On invalid sequences >> Try to swap the two keys, so that combinations work for both a : and the inverse : a)

[Darthagnon]

The only way I can think to implement this would be lots of manually-written rules, per character, and it would basically mean rewriting WinCompose (which I don't have the skills or time to do) and using dotXCompose rules and Xorg rules. I don't know how to do this 😭

Example why these rulesets are needed:

• CapsLock + a + ' = á
• Also, CapsLock + ' + a = á
• Also, CapsLock + ` + a = á or must be manually defined to mean à
• Also, CapsLock + a + ` = á or must be manually defined to mean à
• Need to account for other similar apostrophe marks, e.g. U+2019 "RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK" that could be present and confused
• Repeat for all the thousands of other accented letters and common symbols.

It could provide a speed up when typing, but not 100% sure if it would, since there's some guesswork by the user as to what key combines with what. SymWin with the menu popup is more foolproof and requires less dedicated thinking, in my opinion.

So I'll have to leave this idea labelled as

Unlikely to be implemented

Maybe try WinCompose, which already does this (but doesn't have the character menu popup, and takes up 100+ MB RAM)