Sometimes adding a blank character helps with formatting. For example on Lemmy, it helps me separate lines of text if I insert a blank character between other lines. Currently, do that by copy-and-pasting the blank character from elsewhere. Here is an example

Is there a way I can do this on Linux easily from the keyboard? I am using KDE Neon and have the compose key enabled so that I can easily type uncommon characters like ‽, ñ, and é easily.

  • DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyzEnglish
    5·
    6 months ago

    Most people don’t seem to know this, but you can in fact do line breaks on lemmy, too:

    For each line you want to break
    add two spaces to the end of the line
    then press enter just once

      • DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyzEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Another one for ya: when quoting block text with the character “>”, put a “>” on the blank lines between paragraphs to continue a single block quote.

        so not

        like this

        instead

        like this

        formatting on lemmy is frankly bad, at least documentation of

    • moody@lemmings.world
      9·
      6 months ago

      Yes, but it mostly depends how it’s interpreted by a given program. Some will interpret it as a character being there, but it may take up no space on the screen, for example. Some will show a space, but won’t count it as a space character so it can bypass some text restrictions. Some may show different spacing. Many will also simply not accept them as valid characters.

  • Ephera
    3·
    6 months ago

    I believe Lemmy removed your blank character?
    At least, it doesn’t seem to show up when I try to select it or navigate around it with arrow keys, nor does the formatting look unusual.

    It’s usually possible to type Unicode characters by just inputting their codepoint/number. This kind of varies between desktop environments, but how it works for GNOME (and possibly others) is described here: https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/tips-specialchars.html.en#ctrlshiftu

    Alternatively, you can also change your keyboard layout to include it. On X11, you’d do that with Xmodmap. Looks like there are some alternatives for Wayland, but I don’t know what to recommend there.

    Well, and another option would be to write a script which copies that character to your clipboard and then create a keyboard shortcut to call that script.
    For copying to the clipboard, you can use xclip on X11 and wl-clipboard on Wayland.

  • RoyalEngineering@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    My go-to would be AutoHotKey on Windows. Maybe this Linux version would work? https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11

    Looks like you can get a script that replaces

    ; hotstrings - expand 'btw' to 'By the way' as you type
::btw::By the way
; hotkeys - press winkey-z to go to Google
#z::Run http://google.com

    You might be able to use whatever character you’re using instead of {Space}:

    F19::{Space}
  • kamiheku@sopuli.xyz
    31·
    6 months ago

    FYI you can “separate lines” by simply adding two newlines by pressing Return twice.

    Like this.