On 30 October 2016 at 12:31, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 11:22 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
In mentioning emoji, my main point was that "average computer users" are more and more likely to want to use emoji in general applications (emails, web applications, even documents) - and if a sufficiently general solution for that problem is found, it may provide a solution for the general character-entry case.
Before Unicode emoji were prevalent, ASCII emoticons dominated, and it's not uncommon for multi-character sequences to be automatically transformed into their corresponding emoji. It isn't hard to set something up that does these kinds of transformations for other Unicode characters - use trigraphs for clarity, and type "/:0" to produce "∅". Or whatever's comfortable for you. Maybe rig it on Ctrl-Alt-0, if you prefer shift-key sequences.
It's certainly not difficult, in principle. I have (had, I lost it in an upgrade recently...) a little AutoHotkey program that interpreted Vim-style digraphs in any application that needed them. But my point was that we don't want to require people to write such custom utilities, just to be able to write Python code. Or is the feeling that it's acceptable to require that? Paul