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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.


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    Word count: 300 (about 2 minutes)

    Published:

    Updated: 24 Oct '21 11:27

    Author: Peter Smith

    Permalink: https://petersmith.org/blog/2021/10/15/emacs-and-macrons/

    Section: blog

    Kind: page

    Bundle type: leaf

    Source: blog/2021/10/15/emacs-and-macrons/index.org