On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 14:50 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> IMHO this is the only reasonable way to do accented characters. The
> "compose-key" combos are hopeless for people who actually use accents
> continually, as I do in Spanish. The other option (using a special
> language keyboard) can be even worse. Imagine a keyboard with no
> visible @, |, {, #, \ etc. Monolingual programmers need to aware that
> accents aren't an optional extra but something that if you need them
> you need them all the time and in every context (outside actual
> programming for the most part).
I'm of the opposite persuasion. I find it damn handy that ' characters,
for instance, are simply typed, and don't require special typing. But
with the dead key approach, I find that simply typing plain English
becomes the nightmare that users requiring what's foreign (to us) have
had to put up with. There's a lot of ordinary punctuation that, then,
becomes a two key sequence.
Whereas it's more convenient, for me, to have to do special typing for
the few unusual characters I need, and common punctuation is a single
key, or perhaps with the shift key. Ala using the compose method.
Both methods suck.
Ever more, the need for the standard QWERTY keyboard (and its ilk) to be
abandoned has increased. It's inadequate for anything more than primary
school beginner's English. Standard punctuation and programming
characters need to be one-key-press events, and common typography
characters need to be included as standard keys (e.g. the various dashes
that people bodge up with double minus-hyphens, the inability to easily
type non-breaking spaces and dashes). They're a part of the written
language. Character permutations (e.g. the "a" with all the different
accents it might use) needs to be better handled, without you needing to
know all sorts of tricks that aren't even hinted about by the keyboard
legends. Not to mention how useless it is for languages with far more
than 26 letters.
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