Many years ago I used Latex extensively and so had the ‘muscle memory’ for \ character sequences.
I am using Julia this afternoon and I can see how the muscle memory for \ pm TAB and characters like this can be attained.
However I had an idle though - in old times there were APL keyboards with the funny symbols for that language. I guess a Unicode keyboard would be enormous and there are different ranks (*) of Unicode.
Is there a utility which maybe present an on-screen panel of characters to choose from using a mouse?
A search reveals this keyboard. I now must have one…
@BeastyBlacksmith Oooooh… that looks a good idea (it is a large e-ink screen with keys on top)
However 200 Euros buys a 40% discount. So this thing could cost 500 Euros? That seems very high.
I routinely use about 100–150 Unicode symbols (in addition to ASCII), mostly Greek letters and math operators. I find it much simpler to remember the \ sequence since I already use it for LaTeX, and just set up Emacs to complete/replace these. I don’t think I would be touch-typing if I had to remember where eg \varphi is — instead, I would spend 5 minutes finding it on the keyboard.
In a similar vein I would like to be able to to \alpha<tab> across Windows applications because I keep going to the REPL or Pluto to type μm or similar and then copy/paste back to Teams, Outlook, etc.
I didn’t find exactly what I wanted but I did add a Greek keyboard which can be switched in and out by <left-shift><alt> key combo or an icon on the taskbar. It doesn’t get me the math operators or set stuff though.
In Windows 10, by pressing Windows key + semicolon (;) or period (.) a small window pops up that allows selecting and entering Greek letters and other symbols directly into the application in focus (REPL or other).