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Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2015 17:14:50 -0500
From: Dave Angel <davea@davea.name>
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Subject: Re: Wildly OT: pop-up virtual keyboard for Mac or Linux?
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On 02/10/2015 04:05 PM, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> I know this is way off-topic for this group, but I figured if anyone
> in the online virtual communities I participate in would know the
> answer, the Pythonistas would... Google has so far not been my friend
> in this realm.
>
> One of the things I really like about my Skype keyboard (and likely
> other "soft" keyboards on Android) is that when you hold down a "key"
> for a brief moment, a little mini keyboard pops up, from which you can
> easily choose various accented variants and other symbols. For
> instance, If I press and hold the "d" key, I see these choices (ignore
> the capitalization of the first letter - my mistake sending a text
> message to myself from my phone, and I can't seem to convert it to
> lower case):   Đ|¦&dðď
>
> While I'm a touch typist, I almost never use auto-repeat, which is the
> "binding" of held keys in most environments (curse you, IBM and your
> Selectric!). These days I find my self needing accented characters
> much more frequently than key repeat (C-u 2 5 - suffices in Emacs to
> bat out 25 hyphens). Being an American with an American keyboard, I
> haven't the slightest idea how to type any accented characters or
> common symbols using the many modifier keys on my keyboard, and no key
> caps display what the various options are. And I'm getting kind of
> tired of going to Google and searching for "degree symbol". :-/
>
> Is there an X11 or Mac extension/program/app/magic thing which I can
> install in either environment to get this kind of functionality? I'm
> thinking that if you hold down a key for the auto-repeat interval,
> instead of the key repeat thing making all sorts of duplicates, a
> little window would pop up over/near the insertion point, which I can
> navigate with the arrow keys, then hit RET to accept or ESC (or
> similar) to cancel. It need not be perfect. It might (for example)
> only work in certain environments (Chrome, Emacs, vim, Firefox).
> Anyplace to start. It need even be written in Python (though that
> would be cool.) I think that once something like this caught hold, it
> would fairly quickly take over from the dark lords of auto-repeat.
>
> Thx,
>
> Skip
>

On Ubuntu 14.04, you can get a character map from the bar at the top. 
In my case, the icon is labeled "En" standing for English.  I thought it 
was pretty dumb, till I realized if you click on it, then choose 
"Character", it gives you a selectable set of characters, which can then 
be copied to clipboard, etc.

It's a mouse thing, so it's not what you ask, but it is a start.





-- 
DaveA