{"id":2116,"date":"2005-06-03T12:23:22","date_gmt":"2005-06-03T16:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=2116"},"modified":"2025-02-21T16:51:24","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T21:51:24","slug":"compose-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/03\/compose-yourself\/","title":{"rendered":"compose yourself!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Just one of the things that I really, really hate about Windows is its lack of a sane way of entering accented characters. People are forced to do is remember arcane character codes, like Alt+0235 to get <em><em>\u00eb<\/em><\/em>. I&#8217;m sorry, but I don&#8217;t get why one should need to remember these numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Suns have a <strong>Compose<\/strong> key, that works conceptually a little like backspacing on a manual typewriter. To get e-umlaut, you type <strong>Compose<\/strong> + <em>&#8220;<\/em> (either together, or one after the other) then <em>e<\/em>. It&#8217;s a system thing, and it works in all applications. A <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.sun.com\/app\/docs\/doc\/802-1950\/6i5us7atb?a=view\">table of compose key sequences<\/a> shows the huge range of special characters you can access in this way. Most Linux machines support this too; I have right Alt bound as the Compose key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I need the same facility for Windows. An <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/michkap\/archive\/2005\/01\/22\/358771.aspx\">MS tech staff blog entry<\/a> basically hints that it can&#8217;t be done. But it is being done, admittedly half-heartedly, by MS-Word; if you search for accent in the Help, you can find <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.languages.ttu.edu\/faculty\/snell\/International%20characters%20with%20Word.htm\">Insert an international character by using a shortcut key<\/a><\/em>. Word has done this for years, so why isn&#8217;t it in the OS?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-accent-3-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-99a5d99ab4c52bcba5fbf43a4a4e2b07\"><strong>Update, 2025<\/strong>: You need <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/samhocevar\/wincompose\">samhocevar\/wincompose: \ud83d\udd23 Compose Key for Windows<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just one of the things that I really, really hate about Windows is its lack of a sane way of entering accented characters. People are forced to do is remember arcane character codes, like Alt+0235 to get \u00eb. I&#8217;m sorry, but I don&#8217;t get why one should need to remember these numbers. Suns have a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[37,1990,268],"class_list":["post-2116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-suck","tag-accent","tag-compose","tag-windows"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-y8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2116"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17783,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2116\/revisions\/17783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}