[texhax] curly braces on curly keyboards [was latex/shortish, isn't important]

[Uwe Lück]

At 04:28 19.04.06, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> >>>>> "Uwe" == Uwe Lück <uwe.lueck at web.de> writes:
>
>   > ... however, curly braces are a nuisance on PC keyboards indeed.
>
>I suppose that only those people understand this sentence who had to
>use a *German* keyboard already.  At the EuroTeX-2005 I learned that
>French keyboards are not much better, maybe even worse.
>
>That's the price we have to pay for some beautiful glyphs we have,
>which are absent from some other laguages.

Pshhh ... my favourite editor is a German one from the early nineties,
for the Atari, xEDIT by Alexander Groepl. It supports a gigantic set of
user-defined keyboard macros. This is as helpful as existing (La)TeX
macros (as opposed to MS-Word where you have to create your own
macros). Christoph Zwerschke indeed contributed such a large set of
keyboard macros for LaTeX, on which my typing LaTeX code still builds.

Typically, the editor generates curly braces automatically on some
corresponding /easy/ keystrokes.
(E.g., when I have typed some `XXX' and then press function key F5,
`\textit{XXX}' appears.)
I still use this editor with an Atari emulator (while the TeX binary for
Atari doesn't stand most of my recent applications -- the .dvi viewer
still is very accurate, but very slow). -- I guess that Emacs and
WinEdt fare as well -- but I am still not so willing to try ...

Good luck with your pains on the keyboard,
   Uwe.