On 05 Nov 11:44, Chris G wrote:
While recently playing around with my keyboard and looking at ways to enter special characters I discovered that the Alt key (that's the one on the left, i.e. *not* the AltGr key) doesn't act as a modifier like the AltGr key but, in some cases, acts as a multiplier for the next character.
I.e. if I enter Alt+<digit> the prompt changes to (arg: <digit>) and entering further Alt+<digit> keys adds to the value after arg:. Then on entering the next character it is repeated arg times. This is (for me anyway) a totally useless facility, I'd much rather the Alt key acts as a shift key (like the AltGr key) and gives special characters.
I have some documentation that gives the standard/default characters generated by Alt and AltGr as follows (intermediate mail systems willing):-
<snip class="large mapping table" />
In all my terminal windows the above AltGr combinations work but none of the Alt ones do, I'd like the Alt ones as well. I could then type things like ¢ (cents) and ® (registered) without too much hassle. (The above ways of typing accented characters aren't so much use as they're not easy to remember and I use a Compose key to do them)
All of the Alt key combos are available from AltGr too... and the two you've listed are erm, in sensible places.
AltGr + c -> ¢ AltGr + Shift + r -> ®
For more fun, there's also the compose set (Shift + AltGr followed by a sequence of characters, e.g. Shift + AltGr < < -> « and Shift + AltGr >> -> », also for accents there's two choices, there's the standard dead key with AltGr, or there's the compose method... e.g. ä is available as the easily remembered Shift + AltGr " a, or AltGr + [ a.)
For a full list of what the default compose keys are (Shift + AltGr), see: /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
Most of the fun ones are under Multi_key stuff.
Cheers,