Char Menu

• Various methods to insert a Unicode symbol in Emacs
• Installation
• Usage
• Example of configuration
• Visual appearance of the menu
• License

This package allows the user to create a menu for fast insertion of arbitrary symbols.

Features:

• The symbols can be organized in hierarchies.

• Most frequently used symbols require only one keystroke, while others are placed in dedicated sub-menus (for example, “arrows”) and can be inserted with two or three keystrokes.

• Paired characters like “” can be inserted. Normally, the point will be placed between the characters, but if some text is selected, the paired character will wrap it without moving the point.

Various methods to insert a Unicode symbol in Emacs

Let's skip copying characters from a file or web-page—it is too inefficient.

One method to insert arbitrary characters is to use key-translation-map, like this:

(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "<menu> p") (kbd "φ"))

The main problem here is that if you have many such translations, they are hard to remember. This approach is also not very good for organizing symbols into categories.

Another approach is to use abbrev-mode. I don't like that mode because one needs to keep it enabled and chances are even if you normally don't need the word “alpha”, it does not mean that you always want to replace it with the symbol “α”.

Inserting a character by its name is done with the insert-char command, but it cannot be used heavily because even with auto-completion it takes too long to type the full name of a character. Also, I usually don't want to pick from all available characters, but rather from a subset of them.

Installation

The package is available via MELPA, so you can just type M-x package-install RET char-menu RET.

If you would like to install the package manually, download or clone it and put on Emacs' load-path. Then you can require it in your init file like this:

(require 'char-menu)

Usage

Normally, there are only two things that you need to do:

1. Set the variable char-menu.
2. Bind the command char-menu.

The variable char-menu can be customized via the “customize” interface (M-x customize-group char-menu RET) or set with setq. That variable should be bound to a list where every element is either a string to insert or a sub-menu, which is represented as a list where the first element is the header of the sub-menu and the rest is its items.

Place the most frequently needed characters at the beginning of the list. Other characters can be organized in categories: “Arrows”, “Greek letters”, “Math symbols”, whatever. It's best to keep the number of the menu items less then 10, because then you will be able to choose a character using a single key press on the home row. You don't need to think about key bindings—the package assigns them for you.

Usually you want to insert a single character, but there is a need for paired punctuation like “this” or «this». Just put these characters together and they will be inserted with point (cursor) between them. Wrapping of selected text is also supported.

As for binding of the char-menu command, it should be as easy as:

(global-set-key (kbd "<menu> SPC") #'char-menu)

Of course you can choose a different key combination.

Example of configuration

The default configuration is quite basic:

("—" "‘’" "“”" "…")

As an example of something more sophisticated, try this:

("—" "‘’" "“”" "…" "«»" "–"
 ("Typography" "•" "©" "†" "‡" "°" "·" "§" "№" "★")
 ("Math"       "≈" "≡" "≠" "∞" "×" "±" "∓" "÷" "√")
 ("Arrows"     "←" "→" "↑" "↓" "⇐" "⇒" "⇑" "⇓")
 ("Greek"      "α" "β" "Y" "δ" "ε" "ζ" "η" "θ" "ι" "κ" "λ" "μ"
               "ν" "ξ" "ο" "π" "ρ" "σ" "τ" "υ" "φ" "χ" "ψ" "ω"))

Except for Greek letters that are a bit too numerous, all characters here can be accessed in one or two key strokes.

Visual appearance of the menu

Just like ace-popup-menu, the package is built on top of avy-menu, which implements a handy Avy-powered popup menu. To control appearance of the menu, invoke M-x customize-group avy-menu RET.

License

Copyright © 2016–present Mark Karpov

Distributed under GNU GPL, version 3.