42
EX-11: Prepping for Plasma’s Last X11-Supported Release – David Edmundson's Web Log
(blog.davidedmundson.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
42 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
65581 readers
251 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
Well, now you know one who doesn't and hasn't for years
And now two! Touchpads work like a dream for me
I also use wayland on both my laptop and desktop.
The only issue I have is the lack of some utility which I can use to type my german umlauts using macros. On windows I had an autohotkey script so that alt + a would become ä and so on.
I've tried a couple programs that work on wayland, but without success in getting them to work how I wanted. The last time I checked there were a couple promising candidates left that are explicitly not working on Wayland though.
This reads like quite a different workflow, but AFAIK the standard in both x and wayland for inserting special characters is using a compose key. You can set up a key as the compose key in the keyboard settings of any de/wm/compositor (right alt in my case) and use it in a key sequence to assemble special characters. I use it all the time to type italian accent characters on a us keyboard and it's always dependable and quite intuitive even for characters I don't regularly use.
Some examples:
composea"→äcomposee'→écomposec,→çcomposeoo→°compose->→→I'm not saying your use case is invalid, but it falls well into unsupported territory I feel like, and reminds me of this.
This said, there must be a way for an application to simulate input, that's what virtual keyboards do, including steam's virtual keyboard which is not integrated in the desktop environment, so your workflow can likely be replicated. You might need to spend some time finding the right tool for it, or possibly creating your own, but wayland and plasma wayland in particular have all the bits in place to make this happen.
I am aware of the compose key, I was just never a fan of it. I have it set up to replicate my previous autohotkey script on my laptop but I found that in some rare cases, pressing the next key for a word I am typing would change the letter from what I intended to something else.
Using the compose key like 'compose + " a' also feels unintuitive to me and introduces one more key for me to press, though I could likely get used to it with some effort.
Your best bet might be a keyboard with QMK/VIA support. Bake those shortcuts directly into the keyboard firmware.