The "cent key"

[Ben Scott]

On 7/8/07, Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:
>> On my mac I can hold option $
>
> On my ThinkPad under FC6, I can just type ¢ By selecting Menu, Character
> Map, View, by Unicode Block, Latin-1, finding the character, clicking
> Copy, clicking back into the message, selecting Paste.

  As the French say, "voila!" (Literally, "My hand hurts!")[1]

> I'll keep both keyboard layouts around and switch them with
> the GNOME panel Keyboard Indicator....

  To that, I say: Voila!

  I'm thinking the Right Thing to do would be for that keyboard layout
to only insert "special"[5] characters when using that third[3]
modifier.  So maybe you get the Unicode proper-apostrophe with
<SUPER>+<'>[8], leaving <'> alone giving you the ASCII
multipurpose-single-quote-and-apostrophe character.  Assuming, for
whatever reason, such a change can't be pushed back to the upstream,
it would, I suspect, at least be worthwhile to track down the key
layout definitions and create your own variant that implements this
behavior.

[1] Apologies to Dave Barry.[2]
[2] http://sonic.net/~roelofs/humor/cybermuffin.html
[3] Third?  Shouldn't it be fourth?[4]
[4] Shift.  Control.  Alt.
[5] i.e., non-ASCII [7]
[6] "I am not a number!  I am a free man!"
[7] i.e., Unicode, HTML character entities, etc.
[8] "Super" being the traditional fourth modifier.[9]
[9] http://world.std.com/~jdostale/kbd/SpaceCadet.html

-- Ben