[Interest] Preventing ^2 from being converted to a superscript 2

[Ben Haller]

Thanks Thiago and Jean-Michaël!  Useful info from both of you.

Regarding this that you wrote, Thiago (I don't seem to have received the 
original email, but I see it quoted below):

 > But dead keys are a normal feature of a lot of languages. You simply 
can't type French, Portuguese, or Spanish (among many others) without them.

On macOS, to type the accented character in Jean-Michaël's name, I type 
<option>-u, which produces the umlaut ¨ as an accent and waits for the 
next character, and then I type e and it produces ë. To me that is a 
pretty nice solution, because it makes it pretty straightforward to type 
a great many accented characters, not in just one language but across 
many languages.  I can type ã from Portuguese with <option>-n + a, ñ 
from Spanish with <option>-n + n, ŵ from Welsh with <option>-6 (shift-6 
is an ASCII circumflex) + w, č from Czech with <option>-v + c, ç from 
French with <option>-c + c, and so forth.  This seems like a much better 
idea than changing the meaning of a base key like ascii-circumflex to be 
an accent (and thus making it difficult to type x^2) or dedicating whole 
keys to a single accented character (and thus pushing {}[] etc. into 
more difficult sequences). (<option> being also labeled <alt> on macOS 
keyboards.)

Perhaps I am just used to my own keyboard, and am being 
English-centric.  But in my defense, I can say that several of the 
French students in my workshop said that their keyboards were very 
annoying for coding (which they do all day), and that they wish they had 
a US-English keyboard instead.  So even the people that these other 
keyboard systems are designed for don't seem particularly happy with 
them.  Anyhow, obviously this is off-topic for the QT list, so I'm happy 
to leave this conversation.  The information everybody has provided is 
very helpful, and will go into a little "troubleshooting" section in the 
manual for my software.  :->

Cheers,
-B.


On 7/26/26 7:40 PM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On Sunday, 26 July 2026 08:50:24 Pacific Daylight Time Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> But dead keys are a normal feature of a lot of languages. You simply can't
>> type French, Portuguese, or Spanish (among many others) without them. The
>> French keyboard layout has a dedicated key for é, because it's so common and
>> it's the only letter with the acute accent in French. But not so for the
>> grave, diaeresis ("tréma"), or circumflex accents, because they can apply
>> to any of the 5 vowels, and dedicating 12-15 extra keys in the keyboard
>> would be impossible (French doesn't have ä or ö and I can't recall a word
>> with ü, but might as well provide it so they can type German).
> Correction, ì and ò don't exist in French. But à, è and ù do, with à and ù
> existing in exactly one word each. There's a dedicated key for each, like for
> é and ç. All those extra keys pushed the numbers and the period onto Shift and
> quite a few symbols like {} and [] into AltGr. That's the second most annoying
> thing about using the AZERTY keyboard layout for programming (after being
> AZERTY in the first place).
>
> Also note the traditional AZERTY layout has an "undead" circumflex in AltGr+ç.
> Using that will not cause superscript.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Interest mailing list
> Interest at qt-project.org
> https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest