[SGVLUG] International keyboard issue (really short this time)

[David Lawyer]

On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 02:12:51AM -0600, Tom Emerson wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 September 2005 07:10, Terry Hancock wrote:
> >
> > This feature is called "dead keys" by the way. It's waiting to see
> > if you wanted the quote character to form a diacritic composite
> > character with the next key type (e.g. ` + u = ??).
> 
> ahh -- yes, I knew what it was "doing", but not what it was called.  Thanks.

The dead key is say ` which changes the meaning of the next key.  This
is also know as "compose".  You use the composition of 2 keys to get
the new character.

For the console, there's a lot of keymaps in
/usr/share/keymaps/qwerty/ It uses the keyword "compose" for such
compositions.  However, I thought that "compose" was pretty much
obsolete since normally one justs toggles between two character sets
using say the right-control key (for Russian).  I've had to modify the
keymap I use to make the ESC key nearby (easy to hit) for use with the
vim editor.  Except that the old dumb terminal I often use was smart
enough to have the ESC key easy to hit.  This keymap I modify is
/etc/console/boottime.keymap.gz.  Even though it says "boottime", it
seems to remain the default keymap when I use the PC.  There are a lot
of other keymaps (type "locate *keymap.gz" to see them all).  There's
perhaps hundreds of such keymaps and you find the one closest to what
you want and edit it. 

There's a detailed description of some of this in the Keyboard .. HOWTO.
It covers X-windows also, but I haven't read that part.  It would seem
logical that xterm in Xwindows would use the same keymap, but for me it
fails to find my modified keymap since the ESC key is not where I put it
when I use xterm.  But I seldom use xterm so I'm not bothering to fix
it.

			David Lawyer