Hello,

My question is related to this thread and this one. But I need a different solution.

In KDE 3.5 and older, an applet version of kcharselect existed: "Character Selector". This applet would sit in kicker. You could customise it to hold certain latin characters with diacritics. A click on any given character would insert it into klipper. This was an essential tool for me which I used on a daily basis. I use compose keys but I need much more diacritics than accessible via this method. Are there any plans to port this useful applet to KDE 4? Or do you know of any alternatives? All my searches have been unsuccessful.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

A character selection plasmoid appears to be available on my KDE Trunk ( to be 4.4 ) installation. This will likely be part of KDE 4.3. I do not know if it will meet your requirements however.

A character selection plasmoid appears to be available on my KDE Trunk ( to be 4.4 ) installation. This will likely be part of KDE 4.3. I do not know if it will meet your requirements however.

Thanks for your reply.

I assume you are talking about the same plasmoid that I have in KDE 4.2.4. Several problems:

1. This plasmoid is not customizable; i.e. it won't show the set of characters you want. Instead, it simply shows you a character map. Presumably the characters shown are all within the ASCII range and nothing else.

2. You have to click on a character to select it and then click to add it to your clipboard. The applet in KDE 3.5 used to add the chosen character directly to your clipboard. One click per character is a lot in a long text.

3. The old applet presented you the characters you had selected as part of your applet directly. In the plasmoid you have to click on a thumbnail, which then presents you the ASCII map. Again one click too much. But I could live with this one, only if the characters presented were the ones I wanted.

Can anything be done? The KDE 3.5 applet was essential for linguistic work.

Thanks.

You could look and see if a SuperKaramba, Google or Mac OS X dashboard widget exists which fufills your requirements, since Plasma supports them also.

I would recommend filing a feature request at bugs.kde.org if one does not already exist also.

bcooksley wrote:You could look and see if a SuperKaramba, Google or Mac OS X dashboard widget exists which fufills your requirements, since Plasma supports them also.

I would recommend filing a feature request at bugs.kde.org if one does not already exist also.

OK, thanks. I will see what I can do.

debsid wrote:bcooksley wrote:You could look and see if a SuperKaramba, Google or Mac OS X dashboard widget exists which fufills your requirements, since Plasma supports them also.

I would recommend filing a feature request at bugs.kde.org if one does not already exist also.

OK, thanks. I will see what I can do.

debsid wrote:Hello,

My question is related to this thread and this one. But I need a different solution.

In KDE 3.5 and older, an applet version of kcharselect existed: "Character Selector". This applet would sit in kicker. You could customise it to hold certain latin characters with diacritics. A click on any given character would insert it into klipper. This was an essential tool for me which I used on a daily basis. I use compose keys but I need much more diacritics than accessible via this method. Are there any plans to port this useful applet to KDE 4? Or do you know of any alternatives? All my searches have been unsuccessful.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Not an applet, but kcharselect does what you need. I have that as an icon specifically because it allows the selection of pretty much any character I could ever imagine needing.

To be honest, the KDE4 applet seems pretty pointless unless for some reason you can't use a keyboard.

beermad wrote:Not an applet, but kcharselect does what you need. I have that as an icon specifically because it allows the selection of pretty much any character I could ever imagine needing.

To be honest, the KDE4 applet seems pretty pointless unless for some reason you can't use a keyboard.

Exactly, the KDE 4 widget of kcharselect is a useless "thing". Maybe someone wanted to extend it to replace the old applet, but then gave up!

No, kcharselect does not what I want! At least as far as I have been able to work it.

The point of the KDE 3.5 applet was that you could select your own accented characters and sort them anyway you wanted. One click would then insert it into Klipper and you were ready to insert it into your text. The convenience of having the set of characters in Kicker made windows switches unnecessary. Whoever had written that applet was a genius of simple design.

In KDE 4's kcharselect you have to navigate through codepages and fonts for each individual character or search for it. kcharselect is the best solution for people who need a diacritic every now and then. I, however, need more accented characters than simple ASCII characters. Working with kcharselect can quickly turn into a nightmare.
With compose keys enabled I can help myself to some extent but I need far more diacritics than available via alternative solutions.

For the time being I have a file on my desktop with all the characters. I keep it open and copy & paste what I need. But this is also very cumbersome. The KDE 3.5 allowed to click on a character. Highlighting some of these small diacritics (so you can copy them) can be a pain.

People in linguistics and related fields all agree: the old KDE 3.5 applet was an unsung hero Please bring it back.

Has anybody found an alternative yet? I'm having a lot of difficulty writing things for my french class without this applet. It's taking a lot of clicks as it is...

AstroBoy98 wrote:Has anybody found an alternative yet? I'm having a lot of difficulty writing things for my french class without this applet. It's taking a lot of clicks as it is...

For French, the Compose key should be sufficient.

Take a look here for an explanation on how to enable it.

A solution that I thought of that may need some work from you.
In opensuse I have an applet called Paste. This tidy little thing sits in the system tray and allows you to have a set of text that you can copy. It will require one click and some scrolling but you can keep a set of characters here for ready pasting

The version Character Selector in KDE 4.4 has more features, including being able to set the portion of the character map you want. It doesn't have the one-click copy or the ability to show a list of characters, though.

The bug report exists here:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=190776