Input characters not available on the keyboard (was: New syntax for blocks)

[Ben Finney]

Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > I don't know what the state of the art on Mac is these days, but in
> > 1984s Macs had a standard keyboard layout that let you enter most
> > available characters via the keyboard, using sensible mnemonics.
> > E.g. on a US keyboard layout, you could get ≠ by holding down the
> > Option key and typing =.
[…]

> I don't think there's any left-arrow character available on the
> keyboard though, unfortunately.

I'm glad to live in an age when free-software “Input Methods” for many
different character entry purposes are available in good operating
systems. I switch between them using SCIM <URL:http://www.scim-im.org/>.
At a pinch, when I'm without my GUI, I can turn some of them on with
Emacs. Common input methods → joy.

I usually default to the “rfc1345” input method which has many
non-keyboard characters available via two-character mnemonics from the
eponymous RFC document — which appears to be about the only purpose that
document has any more.

-- 
 \         “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is |
  `\       able to think things out for himself, without regard to the |
_o__)          prevailing superstitions and taboos.” —Henry L. Mencken |
Ben Finney