Episode: 3523
Title: HPR3523: The Compose key
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3523/hpr3523.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:56:49

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3523 for Wednesday 2nd of February 2022, today's show
is entitled The Compose Key, It is hosted by D&D and is about 7 minutes long and carries
a clean flag. The summary is, what is the Compose Key and how to set it up on X, no
mad windows.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Haka Public Radio, my name is D&D. This
came out of a brief conversation on the Matrix channel and I mentioned the Compose Key.
The Compose Key is a key that you map on your keyboard and it initiates a sequence of
other keys that then print a given character. In the beginning I thought the Compose Key
was like you would hold down the Compose Key and then press other keys so you would type
the sequence while holding the Compose Key but that's not the case, you just press the
Compose Key release it and then press the other keys. So that's kind of interesting because
it means if you have a fancy keyboard that you can map, it means you can use a key, something
like the shift that's otherwise only used as a modifier, you can map your Compose Key
to the shift key, just pressing it, not pressing and holding it. So, but that's not what
I do, I use the right alt key which is by default it would be like the third layer
of the keyboard but then if you're using the Compose Key there's no need for the third layer
anyway. So most people use the right alt key as their Compose Key I think. So for me it's like
I work with localization so sometimes I have to type some characters that aren't in my language,
I don't even know how to type them really, but a lot of the Compose Key sequences are really
intuitive. So like for example if you have to type that L with a line across it that's used a
lot in Polish for example, you just press Compose slash L and then you get that. Other similar things
like Compose O and then the capital A for example will give you the capital A with a little circle
above it. So that sort of thing is pretty intuitive a lot of the combinations you don't really
even have to know them in advance to be able to type them out when you need them. Yeah you can also
type things like the fancy opening and closing curly quotes and other kind of special fancy
characters. Also things like the subscript 2 for example it's very intuitive Compose underscore
2 you get a subscript 2. Also you're able to create your own sequences so that basically becomes
like a macro you can just make it type your signature or whatever you want. So I use Gira at work
and when you're typing in Gira there's a few characters that are bound to its syntax so
if you want to just type them out and have them displayed like that sometimes it doesn't work.
There's a couple weird things like two curly braces will open a code inline code spam so if you
need those to actually be in your text you're you're going to have to escape them and also more
strangely if you just type one curly brace and then another one to close it the somehow for some
reason it creates a line break when in the rendered version of your comment in Gira so that kind
of sucks. So what I did was I made a sequence that's just two presses of the Compose key and then
the curly brace instead of typing a curly brace it's just going to type the HTML entity that makes
it so then that's that escapes it in your syntax. I think there's some other way to escape it but
I was never able to get it to work this works just fine so how to do this then so if you use
so at work I use Windows so there's an application called Win Compose that gives you all that
and it gives you a bunch of other stuff to like some of those fancy emojis and stuff there's ways
to type them they also have this kind of second layer sort of thing which is two two presses of
the Compose key opens up a bunch of other things that are kind of outside of the regular
Compose sequences that you will find for example in the X display server so in X I'm just going to
put in the show notes the the section of the arch Linux wiki that explains all this you do like
set xkp map dash option and then compose colon rot r a l t to say the right alt key that will make
the compose key available in the right alt key you can likewise do other stuff like mapping the
making your caps lock an extra control key that's another another option that I use so this is
what you do to make the to map your compose key in x so if you use gnome this is available in the
I remember if it's the gnome tweaks or if it's just a regular yeah I think it's in the tweaks so
you have to install tweaks and then you get that option to map the compose key not sure if you can
create your own sequences or I mean of course you can but I'm not sure how I'm not going to get
into that if you're using x then there's this file in your user folder that's dot x compose where
you can enter your own custom sequences yeah yeah again this will be in the arch wiki here
and it's very clear very very easy to follow okay so yeah I think the compose key is really
interesting I use it a lot even to type in my own Portuguese language which you know I kind of
got used to it and I I just use the us layout and I just use the compose key to type all the
the accents and all that stuff whenever I need them all right well thanks for listening
and tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio bye bye
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