Shaun McCance
shaunm@gnome.org
Michael Hill
mdhillca@gmail.com
Ekaterina Gerasimova
kittykat3756@gmail.com
Andre Klapper
ak-47@gmx.net
Type characters not found on your keyboard, including foreign alphabets, mathematical symbols, and dingbats.
Enter special characters
You can enter and view thousands of characters from most of the world’s
writing systems, even those not found on your keyboard. This page lists
some different ways you can enter special characters.
Methods to enter characters
Characters
The character map application allows you to find and insert unusual
characters, including emoji, by browsing character categories or searching
for keywords.
You can launch Characters from the Activities overview.
Compose key
A compose key is a special key that allows you to press multiple keys
in a row to get a special character. For example, to type the accented
letter é, you can press compose then '
then e.
Keyboards don’t have specific compose keys. Instead, you can define
one of the existing keys on your keyboard as a compose key.
You need to have Tweaks installed on your computer to
change this setting.
Install
Tweaks
Define a compose key
-
Open the Activities
overview and start typing Tweaks.
-
Click Tweaks to open the application.
-
Click the Keyboard & Mouse tab.
-
Click Disabled next to the Compose Key
setting.
-
Turn the switch on in the dialog and pick the keyboard shortcut you
want to use.
-
Tick the checkbox of the key that you want to set as the Compose
key.
-
Close the dialog.
-
Close the Tweaks window.
You can type many common characters using the compose key, for
example:
Press compose then ' then a letter to
place an acute accent over that letter, such as é.
Press compose then ` (back tick) then a
letter to place a grave accent over that letter, such as
è.
Press compose then " then a letter to
place an umlaut over that letter, such as ë.
Press compose then - then a letter to
place a macron over that letter, such as ē.
For more compose key sequences, see the
compose key page on Wikipedia.
Code points
You can enter any Unicode character using only your keyboard with the
numeric code point of the character. Every character is identified by a
four-character code point. To find the code point for a character, look it up
in the Characters application. The code point is the four characters
after U+.
To enter a character by its code point, press
CtrlShiftU, then type the
four-character code and press Space or Enter. If you often
use characters that you can’t easily access with other methods, you might find
it useful to memorize the code point for those characters so you can enter
them quickly.
Keyboard layouts
You can make your keyboard behave like the keyboard for another language,
regardless of the letters printed on the keys. You can even easily switch
between different keyboard layouts using an icon in the top bar. To learn
how, see .
Input methods
An Input Method expands the previous methods by allowing to enter
characters not only with keyboard but also any input devices. For instance
you could enter characters with a mouse using a gesture method, or enter
Japanese characters using a Latin keyboard.
To choose an input method, right-click over a text widget, and in the menu
Input Method, choose an input method you want to use. There is no
default input method provided, so refer to the input methods documentation to
see how to use them.