Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:30:02AM +0200, Torje Digernes wrote:
> On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 21:46:38 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 11:25:09PM +0200, Kiith-Sa wrote:
> >>You mean like
> >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard
> >>?
> >
> >Whoa! That is exactly what I had in mind!!
> >
> >Pity they don't appear to support Linux, though. :-(
> >
> >
> >T
> 
> If you want to configure your keyboard so you can type unicode in
> Linux you should make yourself familiar with xkb, it is not that
> difficult to work with, but not exactly user friendly either, super
> user friendly though.

Oh, I know *that*. I configured my xkb setup to switch between English
and Russian with the unused windows key (I used to have Greek too, but I
use it rarely enough that I took it out). It's just that without the
dynamic key labels, I have to touch-type, which requires learning each
layout as opposed to just looking for the symbol I need on the key
labels. And I have yet to figure out a sane way to support *all* of
Unicode without making the result unusable -- when I had Greek in the
mix, it was already getting cumbersome having to continually hit the
windows key repeatedly when alternating between two of the 3 languages.
That's simply not scalable to, say, 100 modes.  :-P

But maybe I'm just missing a really obvious solution. That happens a
lot.  :-P


T

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