9ime

Plan 9's keyboard driver basically turned ALT into a multi-purpose dead key, where different sequences of keys following ALT would result in different characters being emitted. eg.

• ALT SPACE SPACE : ␣
• ALT > > : »
• ALT a e : æ
• ALT ' e : é

This package brings the feature to windows, though it's only triggered by RIGHT ALT since ALT is obviously used extensively in windows itself.

Installation

1. Clone repository 1a. Edit the keyboard text file if you want to add to the available sequences
2. ./build.sh
3. ./9ime

Note that you won't get any output or feedback from 9ime to indicate it is running. To close it open task manager, look for 9ime.exe in background processes and End Task.

Overview

The shipped keyboard file is essentially the one from 9fans/plan9port which covers:

• Latin alphabets (eg. Ð Ñ þ æ ę è é ê ë)
• Symbols (eg. £ € © ¡ ¿ °)
• Maths (eg. ÷ ± ² ³ ∀ ∃ ∈ ∑ √ ≠ ≡ ≤)
• Greek (eg. α γ π Α Ω)
• Cyrillic (eg. Π Ε Κ Ο Ρ Α)
• Chess (eg. ♔ ♛ ♝)
• Music (eg. ♩ ♭ ♯)

Plus some additions of my own:

• Japanese (eg. わたし わ の なまえ わ スクヰーク です)
• Fullwidth (eg. ＰＬＡＮ９)

The sequence for each character is often intuitive -- here's some ground rules:

1. Repeating a character gives you a variant of that character
   • !! becomes ¡
   • || becomes ¦
   • >> becomes »
   • == becomes ≡
2. For accents, the accent comes before the character
   • `A becomes À (` = grave)
   • 'A becomes Á (' = acute)
   • ^A becomes  (^ = circumflex)
   • ~A becomes à (~ = tilde)
   • "A becomes Ä (" = diæresis)
   • oA becomes Å (o = ring)
   • ,C becomes Ç (, = cedilla)
   • ,E becomes Ę (, = ogonek -- hey these are guidelines)
   • _e becomes ē (_ = macron)
   • ve becomes ě (v = hacek)
   • ug becomes ğ (u = breve)
3. Greek characters are prefixed by an asterisk
   • *a becomes α
   • *P becomes Π
   • *R becomes Ρ
4. Cyrillic characters are prefixed by an at sign
   • @a becomes а (which looks indistinguishable from latin in my font...)
   • @Kh becomes Х
   • @@K becomes К (note @@K to avoid conflict with @Kh)
5. Hiragana is prefixed by an h
   • hyo becomes よ
   • he becomes え
   • Hyo becomes ょ (note capital H for small kana)
   • hsi becomes し (note "si" not "shi")
6. Katakana is prefixed by a k
   • kti becomes チ (note "ti" not "chi")
   • Kyu becomes ュ
7. Fullwidth is prefixed by a space
   • k becomes ｋ
   • __ becomes ＿
   • _^ becomes ￣

For full details open the keyboard file itself.