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Generally, I am very glad of the differences of KDE from Windows, but the MS-OS has one feature that I really miss in KDE: hold down the Alt key and type an extended character number sequence on the number pad, then release the Alt key and the character appears in the document that has focus. For example, Alt-0149 gives you a bullet character, Alt-0151 gives you an em dash, Alt-0233 gives you an acute accented e, as in café. (HTML ASCII decimal character entities)

It would be nice to have something this simple in KDE. Other encoding schemes could even be added, such as hex (Unicode hexidecimal character entities)

This was asked before, and the answer was always: it needs to be solved upstream, on Qt libraries.

Some time ago I proposed here a "character runner" that it is now implemented: ALT-F2 → and then type # followed by the unicode (exadecimal) number → ENTER to copy the character to the clipboard. For example, #2022 will give you •

Has a feature request been created for this in Qt Dev? If so, could you let me know the issue number (URI) so that I can vote for this?

I did see the "character runner" suggestion, and I did try it, but my attempts fail with a message that no such man page was found. What version of KDE was this implemented in?

Thanks for your attention to this issue.

Not sure if there is a feature request.

The character runner is working since 4.5. On 4.7.4 looks like this:

Do you know about the compose key? Personally I find it far more intuitive than remembering number codes. For example, holding compose, if you type - and then n you get ñ or if you type ; and then o you get ǫ or if you type ' and then e, you get é (as in your café example). Much more visual (and it exists now!)

Compose key? Excellent! Thanks.

I have now enabled it. I like the sound of it much better than the character runner. I will have to see if it works in all the required apps yet, but thanks for the response.

RGB wrote:Not sure if there is a feature request.

KDE relegates responsibility for implementing this feature to Xorg [1], and Xorg relegates to Qt [2], and Qt relegates back to Xorg [3].

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103788
[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26747
[3] https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTBUG-8

RGB wrote:Some time ago I proposed here a "character runner" that it is now implemented: ALT-F2 → and then type # followed by the unicode (exadecimal) number → ENTER to copy the character to the clipboard. For example, #2022 will give you •

How does one install that plugin? All I see is the source code available.

ajjstone wrote:Compose key? Excellent! Thanks.

I have now enabled it.

Hi can you please explain what exactly a compose key is and where I find it, resp enable it?

dotancohen wrote:How does one install that plugin? All I see is the source code available.

It should be installed by default: just open krunner preferences to enable it.

On a side note: compose key do not solve all possible situations. For example, if you are a math teacher and need to insert a Greek character every now and then, compose key will not help you.

RGB wrote:

dotancohen wrote:How does one install that plugin? All I see is the source code available.

It should be installed by default: just open krunner preferences to enable it.

Thank you. It seems that my distro (Kubuntu 11.10) does not package the plugin for KDE 4.7.x, even after installing plasma-runners-addons. How does one install the plugin from the source?

Thanks.