Typing text is getting easier

It was always complicated to type some beautiful text characters, for instance quotation marks ‘’ or “”. Actually, I’ve never known how to do it efficiently enough. When I worked under windows, I pressed the alt key then typed four-digit code of the character, and finally released the alt. That was six–seven keys to press!

There was no such possibility under Linux at all. So I tried to use the OpenOffice.org writer first. After years of software development I decided that there’s no better editor than the Vim. So I started using it everywhere. To edit a text in a web input field, I use the ViewSourceWith add-on for Mozilla. To type an exotic sign ’, I pressed <c-v>u2019. That was another seven keys.

And finally I discovered so called digraphs. This beast can help to type almost any character by pressing only four keys. For example, the same apostroph ’ can be typed as <c-k>'9. Moreover, two-character abbreviation of a sign is very easy to remember:

'6, '9	‘, ’	Digits 6 and 9 are very like the sign itself.
"6, "9	“, ”w	The same story as above.
-N, -M	–, —	En and em dashes respectively.
N0	№	Numero, number.

I haven’t found the ellipsis …, so I had to define it manually in my .vimrc: :digraph 3_ 8230.