CafeTran

Is Autokey unable to assign a keyboard shortcut which involves the Right Alt key (also known as AltrGr) or is it my peculiar Linux setup?

Also Autokey does not seem to able to type a phrase consisting of just one character.

I want to put some special characters in the same places that they are on my Windows keyboard layout (custom made by me), but running into this obstacle I see that I will have to use the pyautogui route.

piotrbienkowski: I want to put some special characters...

I've been struggling with this issue under Linux since the beginning, and understand that Autokey might be the optimal solution especially if you are already using it for other functionalities.

But, very recently I discovered the Ctrl-Shift+U (Unicode code) route. Of course, this implies more clicks to insert a single special character, but it's reliable.

How many special characters are you using on average which are not on your standard keyboard?

Some special characters can be typed in combination with the Compose key (additionally to those with AltGr). Depending your Desktop Environment, you can set the key that will be used as the compose key (I use the right Control).

Press the compose key, then the key or key combination.

Example in French (I believe this is locale dependent) : Compose key, then o + e = œ

If you use multiple input languages, you can use Onboard (virtual keyboard application) to see the keys typed with the different modifiers, depending on the defined language.

Unfortunately, the compose key entries are not displayed. 

If you use Gnome (Shell), here is also a documentation article for entering Special characters:

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/tips-specialchars.html.en

I keep reading about the compose key, but which is the compose key? Like in the joke about lame computer users calling support, asking which key is any key. ;-)

I'd rather redefine my Windows keyboard layout to be exactly the same as I have now in Ubuntu, than use some arcane ways of entering special characters.

Yesterday I typed Right ALt + key and Right Alt + Shift + key across the keyboard to discover quite a number of special characters and I quite like it. :-)

There is no compose key per se. You define the compose key.

If you use Gnome, open (or install) Gnome Tweaks and follow the instructions in the link above.

But since you use both systems (Windows, Ubuntu), this might be too OS-specific for you.

Here are some common compose key combinations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_combinations

Thanks for this Jean, I wasn't familiar with the compose key, but it's a nice easy way of entering most special characters

However: I've discovered today that it doesn't work for some characters specifically in CT. Which is a bit wierd.

I wanted to use it to enter ≤ and ≥ – works in everything else (including entering those characters for this post here in my browser), but not in CT.

Other compose key combos, such as Compose+-+l for £, do work in CT.

Any idea what's going on? Igor?

It's possible that these specific key combos are already defined in CT (I have the menu key defined as the compose key), but that seems pretty unlikely.

Thanks for clarifying Igor. It hadn't occured to me that it could be a Java issue. Shame there isn't a way around it.