Re: Input methods at the age of Unicode

From: Marcel Schneider <charupdate_at_orange.fr>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2015 11:33:12 +0200 (CEST)

On 16 Jul 2015, at 18:22, Hans Aberg wrote:

> One needs a good UTF-8 text editor as well.

ConTEXT displays "UTF-8" in the status bar. I'm pretty confident that it has the potential of becoming the world's best text editor. It's not yet 1.0, still 0.98.6, and many users are already enthusiastic.

> The link above has an entry for that, too.

Thank you, I just can't work with TeX right now, I know it needs some skill.

> It is updated yearly, and there is usually no need to keep the old, but one can - they end up different directories.

> It hard to figure out from the documentation, so it might be better to ask there.

Thank you.

On 16 Jul 2015, at 18:35, Hans Aberg wrote:

> It depends on the objective. Languages may have a number of layouts, which may efficient for just that.
> But if one would want to have a single layout for the Latin scripts, it would be hard to have special letter orders.

My goal is not a single Latin, just a universal Latin depending on locales, now French for France, then fr-BE, de-... en-... and so on, implementing some pinciples in different locales.

> It is used on music keyboards. For example, one can use more than one finger on the same key if it should be pressed rapidly in succession. If the hand needs to move, one shifts the fingers, which will avoid the stretching that would occur in fixed hand positioning.

I've little idea of music keyboards as I primarily learned other instruments, but AFAIK the keystroke dynamics are quite different as opposed to a classical computer keyboard, be it ergonomical or current.

> There are physical keyboard with displays on the keys that can be changed, e.g., [1], thus able to display different key layouts, but currently they are expensive, and the keys require more force when depressed.
> 1. http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

I think that is an idea for users having to toggle between a lot of locales and not the time to learn them all. Very heavy, very much technology. Alternately an onscreen keyboard with visual real-time feedback may allow to get the same effect without looking at the fingers on the keycaps. This is much cheaper, as we have already HD screens if needed (not I, nor do I need any).

On 16 Jul 2015, at 18:36, Hans Aberg wrote:

>> On 16 Jul 2015, at 18:33, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>
>>> From: Hans Aberg
>>> Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 18:21:59 +0200
>>> Cc: Unicode Mailing List
>>>
>>> One needs a good UTF-8 text editor as well.
>>
>> Emacs is one possibility, of course.

Almost everybody, including me, has heard of Emacs and that it is very hard to use.

> And on OS X, Xcode has a good text editor as well.

And on Xfce we have MousePad. No I'll try Notepad++, which reduces the environmental impact of text editing.

Marcel
Received on Fri Jul 17 2015 - 04:34:33 CDT

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