What's even better about the compose key is you don't need to remember the order, either. The two keys in combination can be entered in either order. Oh, and most systems also set up the compose key so you don't need to hold it down while you press the other keys.

So, in Ubunu 9.04 you can pick a compose key by going to:

System | Preferences | Keyboard | Layout | Layout options | Compose key position

Also works in Ubuntu 8.04, it's apparently not a new feature.

It's not specific to Ubuntu, any recent version of GNOME will do.

The "Setting up more compose sequences" of http://canonical.org/~kragen/setting-up-keyboard.html is also helpful. (I don't use those exact sequences, some of them make little sense to me... but it's nice to see a bunch of examples on how to create your own.) The compose key is one of my favorite underutilized features in Linux.

I'm maintaining a larger supplementary compose file at http://github.com/kragen/xcompose now.

Thanks for the pointer!

> On Linux, though, they have the most > brilliant intuitive way of doing this

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it ;-). I have had Compose keys, even labeled as such, on my keyboards since the dark ages. Get a Sun Type 7 Keyboard w/ USB if you want it on your day-to-day PC.

Oddly enough, vim has had this functionality for ages (at least since the mid-90s; ^K triggers it as the "compose" key), but they broke it in a fundamental way during an "upgrade" a few years back. Originally, the compositions were as described by Mr. Sivers: just the pair of keys you'd expect, for instance a + ^ to get â. But then, for no apparent reason, they changed all the defaults to totally unobvious things: it's now a + > to get â, and a + ! to get à, and a + ? to get ã. You can reprogram your own, but the whole point of the system was that you'd just know, which is no longer true, alas.

Woah! Never knew about this! I find myself having to type foreign currencies all the time, so this will be way handy.

Great post!

I've actually never used the Compose feature in Linux.

I prefer dead keys for accents for ease of typing (though it does tend to get hard to remember where you put dead_ogonek when you're not using it on a daily basis) so I naturally just set up my own xkb map. This ceases to be helpful when you're not only adding punctuation or alternate scripts but special symbols or letterforms as well (okay, so the Russian "i" could be on the "I" key for phonetic typing or on the "N" key for what it looks like, but where would you put "left arrow" or "double dagger" or even "logical not"?).

I think the same holds true for the compose key, tho: it's easy to remember "o + / = ø" (or was it "o + -" or even "o + |"? With the kind of redundancy in the compose table, all three probably work), but how do you deal with conceptually similar glyphs like "a with dot below" and "a with dot above"? What about glyphs that looks similar? Once you have to enter a glyph that's rarely used, you'll have to look it up -- and then it'd probably be easier to use a char map unless you're going to use it a lot.

I've been using the auto correct functionality since Word 2.0 to do the same thing. Granted, it doesn't work well when you need to type the character in a post on a message board, but 95% of my need is in Word Processing Programs and Spread Sheets. So, 5 minutes of effort turns (c) to © and (s) to § forever.

These days, the Cocoa text system on Macs is so ridiculously feature-complete that you can do this in web browsers and chat programs as well, along with “smart quotes” and automatic spelling correction.

The Ubuntu page shows that fourth level characters are available as standard for © (AltGr+Shift+C) and § (AltGr+Shift+s.

When I was on windows I used the Alt+NumPad unicode method.

Anyone know how to set the compose key from standard Kubuntu 9.10?

Having an AltGr (third-level chooser) key on my native language keyboard, I was quite surprised to see Ubuntu (Linux in general? It's all in xkb's symbols layout anyway) have not only third level glyphs on way more keys than I was used to from Windows (AltGr+Q = @, AltGr+E = €, etc) but also fourth level glyphs (AltGr+Shift+...). Sadly a lot of them are pretty useless (e.g. the many "logical negation" keys -- I guess they used them in place of None).

In ubuntu I tried to add my own bindings to some unicode symbols with the help of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey.

But compositions I add doesn't seem to work for me.

Tried adding

<Multi_key> <less> <B> : "♥" love # LOVE

Any help please?

Yeah, I wrote one of these compose key intros a while back, too:

http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=814

. . . and it's not just for Linux.

On Mac you can also just enable the character palette, then you can click on it in the topbar and have instant access to all unicode chars which you can then insert.

I don't think the compose key would be intuitive for me. I'd rather select from a palette.

It gets slow that way if you do it a lot. I've been entering unicode in vim (ctrl V u xxxx) and keep a list of the frequently used nearby. But this looks even better.

> On Mac... I never did memorize all of these combinations...

Isn't that what Keyboard Viewer is for?

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=mac/10.4/en/mh2...

AllChars on a Windows laptop is a total lifesaver! I lost all my escape codes due to disuse and had to resort to the character viewer.

Always thought 3rd-level and Compose were the same thing. This is much, much better; thanks!

It would be even better with an Optimus Maximus keyboard[1] that has OLED keys. But it's still at $1700 :-(

[1]: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

I still prefer the dead-keys way of doing this.

I use the otherwise useless CapsLock key as my compose key. Works like a charm: << « >> » ^0 ° ,c ç `e è "i ï /o ø

WHAT MAKES YOU SAY CapsLock IS USELESS?