[SOLVED] Vi and international keyboards dead keys

Question

Hello all,
I'm learning Vi from the excellent documentation by the author himself and Mary Ann Horton at FreeBSD Documentation. However I'm facing a wall that I can't seem to get around.
Under the portuguese keyboard layout as defined by pt-latin1, the following diacritics are dead-keys:
~ (tilde)
^ (circumflex) (above the tilde, requires also the use of the SHIFT key)
` (gave accent, aka back tick) (above acute accent, requires the use of the SHIFT key)
Because they are dead keys, these diacritics aren't compatible with Vi command mode and certain CTRL combinations. They are however very useful. How can I handle this problem in Vi without remmaping these symbols to different keys (it is very important I don't remap them)? Is there a way to temporarily disable dead-keys functionality and have them function as regular one-hit keys?
My search for pt keymaps without dead keys produced 0 results. So, I don't think that is an option.
Last edited by marfig (2010-08-09 00:22:23)

Answer 1

Well, I took a closer look at man keymaps and found a way to deal with this; I can create single modifier definitions and load them with loadkeys.
So, if I look at dumpkeys I may find the following two lines
keycode 27 = dead_acute dead_grave apostrophe
keycode 43 = dead_tilde dead_circumflex asciitilde Control_backslash
I now know the keycodes. So I can create a new file (say, pt-latin1-undead), and write this this:
plain keycode 27 = acute
shift keycode 27 = grave
plain keycode 43 = asciitilde
shift keycode 43 = circumflex
Then all I need to do is load it with:
sudo loadkeys pt-latin1-undead
This will load it on top of my current keymap, replacing only those modifiers I defined and leaving the rest intact. When I'm done and want to get back to dead_keys mode, I simply load pt-latin1 again. Tested it already and works flawlessly!
The only disadvantage I can see is that loadkeys requires root access.
Note: The actual code for circumflex is 'asciicircum'. I didn't know this and my first try with 'asciicircumflex' was giving me a syntax error on loadkeys. So I just tried 'circumflex' and it worked. Seems to be a synonym.
Flagging as SOLVED.
Last edited by marfig (2010-08-09 00:38:14)