Apr 16

Pushing only two times for Caret emoticon in Ubuntu ^^

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I always had to push 2 times the ^ key to get a ^ (Caret) in Ubuntu Linux / Gnome.
So for my favourite emoticon ^^ / ^^, i had to press the Caret button 4 time! What a waste of life. I asked myself, how can i reduce this to 1? Since i know this works in other OSes, i wanted to change it.

By default, ^ is a dead key to generate following symbols: êô⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰ŵêẑûîô⁺ĵĥĝŝâŷĉ. But i don’t need them, i want to generate my favourite emoticon ^^ without pressing 4 times ^…

I’m on a German layout, and tried all of them in gnome-keyboard-properties.
Maybe the keyboard model is related to this, I always choose Asus Laptop, since i use one ^^.

It’s btw a pain in the behind that gnome-keyboard-properties only stores 4 possibilities, and I can’t edit them. I have to remove them an add a new one, and select Germany all the way again T_T. After getting that I had to restart gnome-keyboard-properties to really change the layout, I was able to really test them D:
Same thing for other apps. I had to restart gedit to get the new layout working. This is very confusing and has to be said somewhere… Like in the gnome-keyboard-properties dialogue… And if its not meant to be like this, then this is a bug :D

Did you know that Google does not search for Caret? http://www.google.com/search?q=^
It is used for the power of a number: http://www.google.com/search?q=2^3
Why can’t you escape this with \, like in every other sane application?
More about Google’s lack of special character support can be found here.

I tested some the layouts:

Germany Works, but i have to push ^ two times to get one.
Germany Dead acute Seems to work the same as Germany (but gnome-keyboard-properties was not restarted, so it was untested)
Germany Dvorak Wrong layout, but ^ is not dead anymore, this would be how i like it.
Germany Sun Dead Keys Seems to work the same as Germany (but gnome-keyboard-properties was not restarted, so it was untested)
Germany Dead grave accurate Yeah This is it!!

So have fun on your keyboards, and add ^^ to your custom emoticons in Pidgin for XMPP.


2 comments so far...

  • lubosz Said on April 16th, 2009 at 4:35 pm:

    Using ^ as dead key can be fun too, you could use this for these emoticons:

    < ô_ô>
    ẑ_ẑ
    ⁰_⁰

    I’ve heard the same issue is in Pidgin for Windows, where Windows itself has ^ as a non dead key. Funny, gtk has to have its own keyboard layout in Windows. I ask myself where to conf that :D

  • Nomeutente94 Said on May 1st, 2009 at 9:38 pm:

    Delete this comment please :) First af all, sorry for my bad english, i’m italian. I need urgently this file:

    http://lubosz.de/guitar/guitar.ogg

    But in your blog it doesn’t exist. Can you send me it? I need it! It’s for works Guitar Hero III on Wine!!! :’(

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