[texworks] Space as a hotkey

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-03-26 at 08:17:03 +0200, Stefan Löffler wrote:

 > Hi,
 > 
 > On 2012-03-17 08:51, Ryszard Kubiak wrote:
 > > I wonder whether the space character can be used as a hotkey
 > > to invoke a script. I am thinking of writing a script that
 > > would on the fly replace the space character with ~, depending
 > > on a surrounding context.
 > 
 > I don't think so, but I haven't tried. Whitespaces are ignored
 > AFAIK, so if at all, you should probably use "Space". But still, I
 > don't think single characters are usable as shortcuts (as they are
 > intercepted already by the editor).
 > 
 > > A more general question would be whether TeXworks internals
 > > allow the editor to be extended so that one could define
 > > their own input method. For example, in Emacs many input
 > > methods are defined for editing in various alpabets based
 > > on just ASCII characters. Or, you think that such a feature
 > > is better to be provided by external, keyboard layout tools?
 > 
 > Following Reinhard's comment, this could be very interesting. E.g.,
 > press Ctrl+G to switch to greek letters (useful for math/sciency
 > stuff).  It's not straight forward to implement (efficiently),
 > though. Could you please add it to the issue tracker at Google
 > Code?

I don't know whether it's necessary to have a keystroke for each input
method (such as Ctrl+G for Greek).  In Emacs I select input methods
from a menu and there is a single keystroke which allows me to toggle
between the current one and the previous one.  Thus, the user
interface can be kept very simple and I never needed anything else.

BTW, Emacs has an input method called "TeX" which supports zillions of
characters using the \`e notation.  No need to have a dedicated input
method for French, par example.  It covers many Latin-based languages
and TeX users are familiar with this notation anyway.

For math symbols it's better to have a dedicated input method because
many other symbols can be supported too, not only greek letters.

However, if input methods are provided by scripts, then nothing is
carved in stone and people can experiment with different approaches.
No need to make any decisions now. ;)

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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