Type Characters Not On Your Keyboard

How do you type a € character when your keyboard only has $ on it? Or maybe you need è, é, or ñ. What about a fancy ° degree sign? And how about emojis? Technically those are characters, too!

KDE Linux offers multiple ways:

KCharSelect

Easy to learn, but slow to use.

The KCharSelect app lets you visually search and browse through the entire catalog of characters available across all languages — including emojis. Once you’ve found the appropriate character, you can copy it to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere.

KCharSelect is not pre-installed, but can be installed using the Discover software center.

Install KCharSelect now

Emoji Picker

Easy to learn and fast to use, but limited to emojis.

KDE Linux includes the Emoji Picker app which offers a more streamlined emoji-picking experience compared to using KCharSelect. To launch it from anywhere, press Meta+..

From there, you can search or browse for an emoji, and click on it to copy it to the clipboard tor pasting elsewhere. Emoji Picker automatically remembers the last emojis you used, too.

On-demand character palette

Easy to learn and fast to use, but only has partial coverage for symbols, and no emojis.

  1. Open System Settings
  2. Navigate to Keyboard > Virtual Keyboard
  3. Click Plasma Keyboard and click Apply

Now, whenever you’d like to type an accented character, press and hold the key on your physical keyboard that looks closest to it.

For example, if you want é, press and hold the e key.

In a moment, a pop-up will appear showing possible accented characters. Select the one you want by clicking on it, pressing the number key below it, or navigating to it using the arrow keys and pressing Enter

Compose Key

Very fast to use, but requires some learning, and no emojis.

See how the Euro symbol (€) looks kind of like the letter C with an equals sign through it?

To type € directly, press the Compose key, then C, then =.

Easy!

Similarly, to get é, press Compose, then e, then '.

ñ is made with Compose, n, ~.

° is made with Compose, o, o

… is made with Compose, ., .

…And so on.

But which key is the Compose key? Your keyboard probably doesn’t have one. In this case, you’ll need to re-bind an existing key you rarely or never use to act as a Compose key.

To do this:

  1. Open System Settings
  2. Click Keyboard in the sidebar
  3. Click Key Bindings in the window header
  4. Scroll down to where it says Position of Compose Key and click on it
  5. Choose a key to be your new Compose key! Some keys that are good candidates because they are otherwise rarely used are Caps Lock, Insert, Pause, and Scroll Lock.

Compose key sequences are generally intuitive, but to see the full list of options, open a terminal window and run:

rg Multi_key /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose | cut -d "\"" -f 1,2

Article contributed by under the CC-BY-4.0 license.