Feature request: seamless input of unicode chars

[eugenesvk]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently to input unicode chars you have to pre-define an alias (defalias sml (unicode 😀)), which is rather unergonomic

This is also limited to a single char

Describe the solution you'd like.

Direct way to use unicode symbols without pre-definition, e.g.,

(deflayer qwert😀
q w e r t 🔣😀)

instead of

(defalias  🙁 (unicode 🙁))
(deflayer qwert🙁
q w e r t @🙁)

🔣 here is a reserved unicode symbol prefix that tells kanata to treat subsequent sequence as thought it were a unicode action

Also this 🔣😀😀😀 should insert all 3 unicode chars. And should accept single chars that are composed of multiple code points like 🤲🏿

Describe alternatives you've considered.

Am only aware of the alias option

Additional context

No response

[jtroo]

I believe it is backwards compatible to make the existing (unicode ...) / (🔣 ...) action accept arbitrary characters, and seems like it would be good to reuse it for this use case. This means typing extra parens over the given example, but has the advantage of supporting spaces.

Though on the note of spaces, (🔣 😀 😀 😀 😀) would place only a single space between every face since parsed lists don't know how many spaces were between each item. An alternative solution might then be (🔣 "😀 😀 😀 😀").

[eugenesvk]

Yes, quotes should be used to preserve spaces, that's like their main function :)!

And while extending the action is good I think the simplest case should still be simpler than (). I'm checking if something similar to if let Some(alias) = ac.strip_prefix('@') { can be added, so you just check for if let Some(unisym) = ac.strip_prefix('🔣') { and then invoke the unicode action (and if you need spaces, then suffer the pain of () and "" delimiters ;)

(Btw, it seems that this char is considered a rust char, not a real one, so composed emojis error on this (🔣 🤲🏿) , then extending unicode would also fix this)

[eugenesvk]

By the way, what about inserting unicode text via clipboard (restoring the old clipboard values after) instead of typing char by char and having various app compatibility issues that require linux-unicode-u-code?

Or is this not "low-level" enough?

[jtroo]

By the way, what about inserting unicode text via clipboard (restoring the old clipboard values after) instead of typing char by char and having various app compatibility issues that require linux-unicode-u-code?

Or is this not "low-level" enough?

The existing unicode mechanism for Linux already relies on the DE / application support of C-S-u [hex seq] to work, which I would not consider to be particularly low-level. I would be in favour of adding clipboard as an option for Linux unicode support if that works better - is that what other software does? E.g. espanso?

[eugenesvk]

Espanso uses both and exposes it (and a few other settings) as user configurable option

It uses 2 backends: injection and clipboard, and says

• injection is slow for longer strings
• clipboard isn't instant so you could get previous pastes before the text copied by espanso is "set", so it adds a configurable delay

not sure what the other tradeoffs are

(https://espanso.org/docs/configuration/options/)

the mechanism used to perform the injection. Espanso can either inject text by simulating keypresses (Inject backend) or by using the clipboard (Clipboard backend). Both of them have pros and cons, so the Auto backend is used by default to automatically choose the most appropriate one based on the situation. If for whatever reason the Auto backend is not appropriate, you can change this option to override it.

but also to configure the threshold

clipboard_threshold | Number of chars after which a match is injected with the clipboard backend instead of the default one. This is done for efficiency reasons, as injecting a long match through separate events becomes slow for long strings. This is only relevant if the backend is set to Auto.

It even allows this to be set on a per app basis, which is very cool, but per the docs doesn't work on Wayland