What program causes me to see a preview of the single quote I´m about to type? (layout = us intl with dead keys)

Pistrie · 04-12-2021, 04:51 AM

When I type a single quote like this ´ I see a preview of that character when I type it (I press ´ to type it and then space to make it appear. If I did ´+e it would create an é)

pan64 · 04-12-2021, 05:44 AM

https://kbdlayout.info/features/deadkeys

If I understand it well: the X window system itself (keyboard layout manager) will handle it.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...tionality-in-x
But probably you need to explain better what are you looking for.

DavidMcCann · 04-12-2021, 11:31 AM

What would you actually like it to do? Whatever you want can usually be achieved!

computersavvy · 04-12-2021, 12:59 PM

You possibly have key mapping for that or are using a keyboard layout that enables the enhanced keys.

What keyboard layout do you have defined?
With gnome the settings -> region & language panel allows viewing/setting that.

shruggy · 04-12-2021, 01:34 PM

I don't think what you want is possible at all. When I type a dead key, the cursor doesn't move, and there's no visible feedback until I press another key. Only if the second key can be combined with the dead accent, the composite character is printed. Otherwise either the dead accent itself is printed, or the system waits for another key press if stacking two accents is possible.

This is how dead keys are supposed to work.

Moreover, the Compose key also works this way: the composite character appears only after all required keystrokes, but the keystrokes themselves are not echoed.

ondoho · 04-13-2021, 03:29 PM

The behaviour has changed recently in many gui applications like Firefox, Geany etc, to behave like OP describes it.
These two only have gtk3 as a common dependency (on my system).
I cannot see the new behaviour in any gtk2 apps.
So, the change in behaviour could have occured in GTK3 itself or one of the packages it depends on...

shruggy · 04-13-2021, 04:19 PM

Ah ondoho, you're right. Strangely enough, I cannot reproduce it in Firefox 78.9.0esr, but in many other GTK3 applications. I also found this post on Reddit. I don't like the patch suggested there though. The observed Firefox behavior and GTK function names like gtk_im_context_set_use_preedit let me suspect that this can be changed programmatically.

This is what GTK documentation says:

Quote:

An input method may consume multiple key events in sequence and finally output the composed result. This is called preediting, and an input method may provide feedback about this process by displaying the intermediate composition states as preedit text. For instance, the default GTK input method implements the input of arbitrary Unicode code points by holding down the Control and Shift keys and then typing “U” followed by the hexadecimal digits of the code point. When releasing the Control and Shift keys, preediting ends and the character is inserted as text. Ctrl+Shift+u20AC for example results in the € sign

Interestingly, Ctrl+Shift+u... works as described in Firefox, too.