Emacs and macrons: A bit better typograghy
I seem to be typing more words and expressions in Māori nowadays. That sees me wanting to use macrons on letters. (i.e., ā Ā ē Ē ī Ī ō Ō ū Ū).
When running Windows 10, that's not too hard; I select a Māori keyboard and away I go.
However, that's not the case under Emacs. I run Emacs under WSL2, and although my keyboard on the 'Windows' side says "English (New Zealand) Maori keyboard", Emacs doesn't see that. So I need to use short-cuts, etc., when wanting to type letters with macrons.
Now I can do it using the good old C-x 8
to get to all (and any) letters/alphabets. But it's tiresome.
Enter Xah Lee and his Unicode tutorial. I used his approach of binding some keys to insert math symbols, and changed it to insert characters with macrons.
;; set keys to insert macrons
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> a") (kbd "ā"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> A") (kbd "Ā"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> e") (kbd "ē"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> E") (kbd "Ē"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> i") (kbd "ī"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> I") (kbd "Ī"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> o") (kbd "ō"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> O") (kbd "Ō"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> u") (kbd "ū"))
(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<f9> U") (kbd "Ū"))
The result is to type the Ā, I just press f9 A
; to get an ā, I press f9 a
. That's about as easy as I can imagine it being.