This is Haka Public Radio Episode 5234 Wednesday, the second off February 2, 2022.
Today's show is entitled, The Compost Key.
It is posted by D&D, and is about 7 minutes long, and Carissa Clean Vlog.
This is what is the Compost Key, and how to set it up on X, no month windows.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Haka Public Radio, my name is D&D.
This came out of brief conversation on the Matrix channel, and I mentioned the Compost Key.
The Compost Key is Key that you map on your keyboard, and it initiates a sequence of other
keys that then print a given character.
In the beginning, I thought the Compost Key was like he would hold down the Compost Key
and then press other keys, so you would type the sequence while holding the Compost
Key.
You just press the Compost Key, release it, and then press the other keys.
That's interesting, because it means if you have a fancy keyboard that you can map,
it means you can use a key, something like the shift that's otherwise only used as a modifier,
you can map your Compost Key to the shift key, just pressing it, not pressing it, holding
it.
But that's not what I do, I use the the right Alt key, which is it's by default it
would be like the third layer of the keyboard, but then if you're using the Compost Key,
there's no need for the third layer anyway, so most people use the right Alt key as their
Compost Key, I think.
So for me, it's like I work with localization, so sometimes I have to type some characters
that aren't in my language, I don't even know how to type them really, but a lot of the
Compost Key sequences are really intuitive, so like for example, if you have to type that
L with line across it, that's used a lot in Polish, for example, you just press Compost
slash L, and then you get that.
Other similar things like Compose O, and then the Capital A, for example, will give you
the Capital A with a little circle above it, so that sort of thing is pretty intuitive,
but a lot of the combinations you don't even have to know that in advance to be able to
type them out when you need them, yeah, you can also type things like the fancy opening
and closing curly quotes, and another kind of special fancy characters, also things like
the sub script too, for example, it's very intuitive, Compose underscore too, you get a
sub script too.
Also you're able to create your own sequences, so that basically becomes like a macro, you
can just make it type your, your signature or whatever you want.
So I use JIRA at work, and when you're typing in JIRA, there's a few characters that
are bound to its syntax, so if you want to just type them out and have them display, like
that sometimes it doesn't work, there's a couple of weird things like two curly braces
will open a code, inline code spam, so if you need those to actually be in your text,
you're going to have to escape them, and also more strangely if you just type one curly
brace, and then another one to close it, the somehow for some reason, it creates a line
break in the rendered version of your comment in JIRA, so that kind of sucks.
So what I did was I made a sequence that's just two presses of the Compose key, and then
the curly brace, instead of typing a curly brace, it's just going to type the HTML entity
that makes it, so then that escapes in your syntax.
I think there's some other way to escape it, but I was never able to get it to work, this
works just fine.
So how to do this then?
So if you use, at work I use Windows, so there's an application called Windows Compose that
gives you all that, and it gives you a bunch of other stuff to like some of those fancy
emojis and stuff, there's ways to type them, they also have this kind of second layer
sort of thing, which is two two presses of the Compose key opens up a bunch of other things
that are kind of outside of the regular Compose sequences, they will find for example in the
X display server.
So in X, I'm just going to put in the show notes, the section of the arch Linux wiki,
that explains all this.
You do like set XKP map, dash option, and then compose colon, route, RALT to say the right
alt key.
That will make the Compose key available in the right alt key.
You can likewise do other stuff like mapping the making your caps lock and extra control
key.
That's another option that I use.
So this is what you do to make the map your Compose key in X.
So if you use NOME, this is available in the, remember if it's the NOME tweaks or if it's
just a regular, I think it's in the tweaks.
So you have to install tweaks, and then you get that option to map the Compose key.
Not sure if you can create your own sequence, or I mean, of course you can, but I'm not
sure how.
I'm not going to get into that.
If you're using X, then there's the file in your user folder.
That's dot X Compose where you can enter your own custom sequences.
Yeah, again, this will be in the arch wiki here, and it's very clear, very easy to follow.
Okay, so yeah, I think the Compose key is really interesting.
I use it a lot, even to type in my own Portuguese language, which, you know, I kind
of got used to it, and I just use the U.S. layout, and I just use the Compose key to type
all the, the accents and all that stuff whenever I need them.
All right.
Well, thanks for listening, and tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of Hacker Public
Radio.
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