Tutorials/Compose-Taste

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- Wählen Sie als Konsolen-Kodierung UTF-8
- Wählen Sie welcher Zeichensatz auf der Konsole verfügbar sein soll. Ich nutze Kombiniert - Latein, slawisches Kyrillisch, Hebräisch, einfaches Arabisch.
  Ich denke, dass die Auswahl mir die gewünschten Zeichen bietet.
- Wählen Sie welche Konsolenausgabe Sie wünschen (was immer Sie möchten, um sicher zu gehen kann man die gegebenen aktuellen Standardwerte nutzen)
- Eine neue Initial RAM-Disk für den nächsten Start wird nun erstellt.

KDE 3.x Konfiguration

Now we can go on and configure our windowing environment. This description uses either Kcontrol or the Kubuntu configuration tool, which exposes the same option dialogue.

Start the System Settings or the KDE Control Center
Regional & Language (for System Settings) or Regional & Accessibility (for Control Centre) -> Keyboard Layout
Choose your keyboard layout
Modify the <menuchioce>Xkb Options</menuchioce> to select/enable the compose key

KDE SC 4.0-4.4 configuration

Now we can go on and configure our windowing environment (Plasma). This description uses the System Settings as they're available in the K-Menu of the Kubuntu install:

Start the System Settings
Regional & Language
Select the Keyboard Layout configuration
Under the Layout tab, select Enable keyboard layouts
Modify Advanced options to select/enable the compose key

Current KDE Configuration

These instructions apply to KDE 4.5 and above.

Start System Settings
Input Devices
Keyboard tab at left (should be initially selected)
Advanced tab at top right
Expand Compose key position.
Choose the key you prefer

Configuration for GTK Applications (Gnome, Firefox, etc.)

GTK (such as also Firefox) and Gnome applications use (on an Ubuntu system) usually SCIM as the input method, not XIM (X Input Method) that relies on the configurations from (X)Compose. Therefore, you will often find that the "a" and "o" macron characters can yield the female/male ordinals "ª" and "º". To still make it work, GTK applications need to be "told" to use XIM instead.

"One Off" Configuration

For a single application you can do it by just setting the environment variable GTK_IM_MODULE for the application to be launched to xim:

$ GTK_IM_MODULE=xim firefox

More permanently that can be done for a single shell session like this:

$ export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim

This can, of course, also be persisted for a single user in your ~/.bash_profile, or for all users in /etc/environment. This is, however, the less elegant way, the more elegant way follows below.

Persistent Configuration

Copy the setup file /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default to /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/xim

$ sudo cp /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/xim

Edit the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/xim and set the input method for GNOME and KDE to xim

...
 GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
 QT_IM_MODULE=xim
 ...

Create a link for the locale all_ALL (or the desired locale only):

$ sudo ln -sf /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/xim /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/all_ALL

If you are using a Debian-derived distribution use following instead

$ sudo update-alternatives --verbose --install /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/all_ALL xinput-all_ALL /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/xim 20

After a restart of the X server everything should work.

Optional Tweaking of XCompose Map

Now that you're using XIM, you can further tweak the XCompose input map for further characters, or for characters in more convenient locations, etc.

To do that follow these steps:

Create a ~/.XCompose file, and put the following lines into it:

# ~/.XCompose
 # This file defines custom Compose sequences for Unicode characters

# Import default rules from the system Compose file:
 include "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose"

# To put some stuff onto compose key strokes:
 <Multi_key> <minus> <greater> : "→" U2192 # Compose - >
 <Multi_key> <colon> <parenright> : "☺" U263A   # Compose : )
 <Multi_key> <h> <n> <k> : "hugs and kisses" # Compose h n k
 <Multi_key> <less> < p> : "< p></p>" # Compose < p

Just log out and in again (no restart necessary), and you can use your new "multi key short strokes" using the compose key to your desire. As you see this even works for creating longer character sequences.

Typing Macrons, Umlauts, Accents, ...

The compose key will be now whatever you have configured it to be, e. g. right logo.

Macrons

compose + shift + hyphen then <vowel >

or

compose + underscore then <vowel >

-->

āēīōū ĀĒĪŌŪ

Umlauts

compose + shift + <single quote> then <vowel >

or

compose + <double quotes> then <vowel >

-->

äëïöü ÄËÏÖÜ

The German Ess-Zet ligature

compose then s and s (twice the "s")

-->

ß

More bindings can be found in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

Links and Further Information