About human languages, including learning them and speaking them
I decided to use my time spent in relative isolation to do something productive and learn another language. I picked Spanish because I am hoping to visit Mexico and other Latin American countries whenever the plague lifts. I decided to document this for anyone who wants to know what options I found and how they have worked for me so far. This is the third part where I explain how I implemented the US International Keyboard on a variety of platforms. This lets me type characters that Spanish uses which do not appear on a standard US English keyboard. And best of all, it a purely free software fix.
Comment #1 posted on 2020-10-03 14:49:29 by Gumnos
Using the X "Compose" key
When typing in Spanish or French, I've long used the Compose key in X. In my startup script (~/.xinit, ~/.xsession, or for me as a fluxbox user, ~/.fluxbox/startup) I have the following line
setxkbmap -option compose:caps
which turns my Caps key (which I never otherwise use) into a Compose key (here are ways to use other keys instead, if you prefer).
I can then type "{compose}{e}{'}" to get "é" or I type "{compose}{n}{~}" to get "ñ" or "{compose}{c}{,}" to get "ç". Similarly I can use "{compose}{?}{?}" and "{compose}{!}{!}" to get "¿" and "¡". There are hundreds of these composable characters and many are intuitive enough that I can guess them if I don't know them cold.
Should work out of the box on Linux & BSD systems running X, and work with pretty much every X application.
Comment #2 posted on 2020-10-31 14:17:54 by Ken Fallon
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