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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Sunday, 26 July 2026 23:49:39 Pacific Daylight Time Ben Haller via Interest 
wrote:
> 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):

Yeah, I got an email delivery report that it was denied.

>  > 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.)

Are you talking about a US QWERTY keyboard? Or are you talking about a French 
AZERTY keyboard? Because your experience does not need to match that of 
everyone else, if you've been almost exclusively using for English. I agree 
with you it makes sense to keep the deadkeys separate when only you need them 
once in a blue moon.

But people writing Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian every day will not 
agree. Dead keys have been a feature of life in computers since the 1980s. And 
have existed in type-writers for a long more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_key#Mechanical_typewriters

> 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.  :->

Yes, coding in AZERTY is very annoying. I completely agree with your students. 
When I lived in France, I switched my keyboard layout to QWERTY, and the 
keycaps be damned. I did the same in Norway, even though Norwegian keyboards 
are QWERTY: the symbols are in different places and makes it annoying for 
coding.

Though that's also circular reasoning: the symbols chosen for coding languages 
were so chosen because they were easily accessible by the people who wrote 
those languages and they were using US QWERTY keyboards...

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Principal Engineer - Intel DCG - Platform & Sys. Eng.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 5176 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20260727/7dd06b8b/attachment.bin>