Cyclekey

Summary

This package provides the command cyclekey-cycle which cycles through relevant diacritics and accents for the character at point, without the need for switching input methods or navigating through the C-x 8 keymap. Languages can be dynamically added and removed using cyclekey-add-language and cyclekey-remove-language, respectively.

Installation

This package can be cloned from GitHub via the following command:

git clone https://github.com/shankar2k/cyclekey.git

To start using it, place it somewhere in your Emacs load-path and add the line

(require 'cyclekey)

in your .emacs.d/init.el file. Then run M-x cyclekey-cycle to use it. To make the best use of Cyclekey, one should to create a global keybinding for cyclekey-cycle function, preferably something short. For example, in my setup, I use M-o.

(global-set-key (kbd "M-o") 'cyclekey-cycle)

If you use use-package, you can configure this as follows:

(use-package cyclekey
  :load-path (lambda () "<path to cyclekey dir>")
  :ensure nil
  :bind ("M-o" . cyclekey-cycle))

Usage

This package defines the following commands:

cyclekey-cycle

Cycle through diacritical marks and accents for the character at point.

By default this commands cycles forwards through set of marks for the character at point. If the character at point is not present in the Cyclekey character cycles, this command does nothing. If the command is invoked with the optional prefix argument (C-u M-x cyclekey-cycle), then it instead cycles backwards through the set of relevant marks.

cyclekey-add-language

Add marks from LANG to the character cycles in cyclekey-cycle.

The language string LANG is added to the list of languages in cyclekey-languages. When called interactively, LANG is selected by the user via completing-read from one of the languages defined in cyclekey-marks-alist. By default, this change is saved for future sessions using customize-save-variable.

cyclekey-remove-language

Remove marks from LANG from the character cycles in cyclekey-cycle.

The language string LANG is removed from the list of languages in cyclekey-languages. When called interactively, LANG is selected by the user via completing-read from one of the languages in cyclekey-languages. By default, this change is saved for future sessions using customize-save-variable.

cyclekey-help

Show how cyclekey-cycle cycles through marks for various characters.

cyclekey-init

Initialize the Cyclekey maps.

This function should be called whenever cyclekey-languages or cyclekey-marks-alist are modified non-interactively.

Example

In this example, we assume that Cyclekey is configured as above, so that cyclekey-cycle is bound to M-o. Suppose that the current set of Cyclekey languages is Spanish and German, i.e., the current value of cyclekey-languages is (list "Spanish" "German"). Suppose that we wish to type the following sentence:

I went to a Mexican café in Düsseldorf and ordered jalapeño salsa.

• To enter “café”, we type c a f e M-o
• To enter “Düsseldorf”, we type D u M-o M-o s s e l d o r f, or alternatively D u C-u M-o s s e l d o r f
• To enter “jalapeño”, we type j a l a p e n M-o o

After typing this sentence we realize, that the next sentence will require Slovak characters:

At the next table, I saw woman who was a doppelgänger for Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová.

We first add Slovak to Cyclekey by invoking M-x cyclekey-add-language[RET] Slovak [RET].

• To enter “doppelgänger”, we type d o p p e l g a M-o M-o n g e r
• To enter “Čaputová”, we type C M-o a p u t o v a M-o

Since we no longer need Slovak, we can remove it from Cyclekey by invoking M-x cyclekey-remove-language[RET] Slovak [RET].

Customization

The behavior of Cyclekey can be modified by customizing the following variables:

cyclekey-languages

List of languages that Cyclekey uses to generate character cycles.

cyclekey-marks-alist

Alist mapping languages to lists of character cycles.

Each keys is a string corresponding to a known language that uses a latin alphabet. Each value is a list of character cycles, where each character cycle is a string with the first character an English letter or punctuation mark, and all subsequent characters are variants marked with various diacritics.

cyclekey-save-languages

When true, save cyclekey-languages for future sessions whenever it is modified interactively. (default true)