Re: stupid iper newbie question

carlo.ambrogio@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
i'm trying to digit the "~" symbol on my italian
keyboard (usually i have to press ALT + 1 2 6 on bloc num keys).



As an italian, I agree, programming with an italian keyboard is often a frustrating experience. I remember the sad days of entering ALT-1-2-6 in front of every perl regexp :)

My advice:

- If you have a Macintosh notebook, in Emacs remap the "meta" key to the "FN" key (which is pretty useless otherwise). If you are using Aquamacs, this can be easily done with the configuration menu. This leaves the option key for the normal character operations. Entering a tilde is then just a matter of pressing option-5, as usual in OS X.

- On Windows, most european keyboards have the "AltGr" key ("right Alt" for the rest of the world) which can be used to obtain certain characters, such as the square brackets, the braces, and the Euro sign. For some reason, Microsoft stopped there, and the AltGr does nothing when used in combination with all the other keys. If you want a tilde, or a backtick for your macro, you are out of luck and must obey to that awful "alt + numeric code" method.
But somewhere on the Microsoft site there is a free tool to create new keyboard layouts. I have used it to create a new extended italian keymap for Windows that use extensively the AltGr key, duplicating the "italian pro" layout of Mac OS X. This allows you to use AltGr to enter the tilde, the umlauts, mathematical signs and a lot of other things, while
the left ALT key is still mapped to the META key in emacs.

As Pascal said, an US keyboard is the best solution for programming, but this keymap solution is a decent compromise IMHO. I can't post the file here, email me if you are interested.

Giovanni
.

Relevant Pages

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