Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

undeadly.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 144 posts

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#11

Post by igravious »

kbd wrote: post #6
igravious wrote: post #2

I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…

I have a stupid little 'clip' program I wrote that has a dictionary of common texts that I can call by name and have added to the clipboard. $ clip lod $ pbpaste ಠ_ಠ Maybe you can do the same without needing to remember code points. Something like TextExpander would accomplish the same thing.

I don't think that's stupid. I think that's a great idea. I might have to use 'xclip' to go about making something equivalent.

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#12

Post by winestock »

dylan-m wrote: post #10
igravious wrote: post #2

I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…

Another really handy thing is the Compose key. If you're using GNOME it's under Keyboard Settings, under Shortcuts / Typing. I have it set to Right Alt. The idea is there's just a whole bunch of memorable key sequences for various common Unicode characters. For example, Alt + o + o = °; < + 3 = black heart, < + " = “, etc. It doesn't have all of the ones you like, but it's helpful :)

Three years ago, I wrote a review of three programs that simulate a Compose key on Windows. I included some history behind that key, as well.

https://windows.appstorm.net/roundups/utilities-roundups/add...

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#13

Post by ori_b »

dylan-m wrote: post #10
igravious wrote: post #2

I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…

Another really handy thing is the Compose key. If you're using GNOME it's under Keyboard Settings, under Shortcuts / Typing. I have it set to Right Alt. The idea is there's just a whole bunch of memorable key sequences for various common Unicode characters. For example, Alt + o + o = °; < + 3 = black heart, < + " = “, etc. It doesn't have all of the ones you like, but it's helpful :)

I usually map my insert key to compose -- I never use 'insert' for the default functionality, but I also don't type funny characters often enough to justify getting rid of an alt or control key.

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#15

Post by ktRolster »

igravious wrote: post #9
msbarnett wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also on OS X, † is option-t, and ‡ is option-shift-7.

Ok, On Linux I have found ‡ and † † is AltGr-Shift-%, and ‡ AltGr-Shift-: I'll never remember them :(

Draw them onto the keyboard next to the % and : keys. I did that with Korean characters until I got the hang of them

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#16

Post by unfamiliar »

igravious wrote: post #2

I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…

I have an Alfred workflow that fuzzy-searches through all unicode characters by name and inserts the character when selected. All it takes is a good interface to make it fluid.

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#17

Post by davidp »

dylan-m wrote: post #10
igravious wrote: post #2

I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table. In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date. Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about Davi…

Another really handy thing is the Compose key. If you're using GNOME it's under Keyboard Settings, under Shortcuts / Typing. I have it set to Right Alt. The idea is there's just a whole bunch of memorable key sequences for various common Unicode characters. For example, Alt + o + o = °; < + 3 = black heart, < + " = “, etc. It doesn't have all of the ones you like, but it's helpful :)

Very cool, thanks. I found a page that shows all the key combinations:

[0]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#19

Post by kazinator »

Great! Now just drop the embarrassing man(1) page reference, and you can call it modernized.

Wow, I'm surprised that the people whose buttons this pushes are able to make(1) a HN account, let alone have enough points to downvote.

Think about it. There is only one man page for xterm. I fyou type "man xterm" with no section number you get that man page. If there existed an xterm(7) page, you'd still get the xterm(1) man page by default. So why the hell write the (1) notation every time you type the word xterm?

Man page section numbers are not useful or relevant, by and large and mentioning them only adds noise to a paragraph.

Even stupider is when the worst of the Unix wankers write man page section numbers after ISO C function names. Example sentence: "Microsoft's malloc(3) implementation is found in MSVCRT.DLL". #facepalm#

Re: Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD

#20

Post by jhallenworld »

I and others have pushed changes into XTerm to improve mouse support of terminal-based applications. All terminal emulators should implement XTerm's command set, especially these:

Bracketed paste mode: allows editor to determine that text is from a mouse paste instead of typed in. This way, the editor can disable auto-indent and other things which can mess up the paste. Libvte now supports this!

Base64 selection transfer: this is a further enhancement which allows the editor to query or submit selection text to the X server. This allows editors to fully control the selection process, for example to allow the selection to extend through the edit buffer instead of just the terminal emulator's contents.

One patch of mine didn't take, but I think it's still needed: allow mouse drag events to be reported even if the coordinates extend beyond the xterm window frame. Along with this is the ability to report negative coordinates if the mouse is above or to the left of the window. Why would this be needed? Think of selecting text which is scrolled off the window. The distance between edge and the mouse controls the rate of selection scrolling in that direction.

BTW, it's fun to peruse xterm's change log. For example, you can see all the bugs and enhancements from Bram Moolenaar for VIM. http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html

Thomas Dickey maintains a lot of other software as well, in particular ncurses, vile and lynx: http://invisible-island.net/

Post reply on HN