Recent convert from Windows here, and for the most part everything has been smooth, but I’ve run into a brick wall with this one.

I write a lot and often like to use non-standard characters. On Windows I was using AutoHotKey to convert e.g. a ctrl-shift-hyphen into an em dash (—) or ctrl-e to type an é.

I haven’t been able to find any good way to do this on Mint thus far. AutoHotKey doesn’t seem to work, and the built-in Keyboard Shortcuts interface is incredibly clunky and slow (i.e. pasting the character maybe 2/3rds of the time, with noticeable delay).

I’d really like to be able to just seamlessly hit a hotkey and type a character like —/é. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? Thanks.

  • 5teverin0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    22 days ago

    I use a tool called Espanso for this type of thing. It’s available on Linux, Windows and MacOS. It’s a text expander app that allows you to enter long passages with a simple keystroke, but can also be used to enter special characters. One minus is that the configuration is done in text files using YAML, but it’s not at all difficult, and the documentation is very good.