Insertion of greek letters

[dhoegh]

Hi, since Julia is fully capable of assigning values to unicode letters and no one has greek letters on their keyboard, it could be a great feature if the insertion of greek letters could be made as autocompletion just like code completion. I’m visualizing something like:
\theta press ctrl+space to get: θ.
So when you want to insert a greek letter you write \ in front just like latex, you could maybe also just skip the backslash. I tried to take a look in custom.js where it probably should be implemented, but my javascript skills is not sufficient:(

[timholy]

Just hit the tab key after typing \alpha

[dhoegh]

Thanks:)

[stevengj]

Yes, this was implemented in JuliaLang/julia#6911. It is available in both the REPL and IJulia interfaces, and also works in the Julia mode of the Emacs and vim editors.

[luminnate]

well, it don't work for me in the repl windows french canadian default . it turns it into ''a'' then gives me an error. a not defined.

[stevengj]

@luminnate, there are two things here:

• First, if α displays as a in the REPL, that is likely just a font issue (the Windows console sucks)—that is, your font doesn't have an alpha glyph in it. Have you tried it in the IJulia (web browser) interface? (Web browsers usually have a default font that at least supports Greek letters.)
• Second, if you type α (via \alpha<tab>) and then hit return, of course it will give an α not defined error, because you haven't defined a value for α. Try typing α = 5, for example, to use α as an identifier.

[luminnate]

changed windows console properties font from raster fonts to lucida and it now turns \alpha to Greek
ijulia turns Greek as well
thank you

as a sidenote when installing ijulia i went by this: https://github.com/stevengj/julia-mit/blob/master/README.md which reccommends anaconda, but it makes no mention of how many manual installs would be needed for ipython, so by the second one I was wondering how many more there would be.

this doc has good info on the manual installs:
https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl

[stevengj]

@luminnate, if you install IPython using Anaconda, no manual installations should be required: Anaconda includes all of the necessary IPython components.

If you found yourself doing manual installs of jinja etcetera, then probably you weren't using the Anaconda Python.

[Suckhwan]

thanks a lot!

[albz]

Can anyone explain me the following: on a mac you can write the most common Greek letter, eg pi, by pressing alt+p. I am wondering whether this sort of shortcuts cannot be used on a Windows console. What's the issue?

[stevengj]

@albz, that's a feature of the Mac keyboard (true across all programs, not just Jupyter): there are special key combinations for typing accented Latin characters and a few other symbols like π. Windows doesn't have this.

[dnabanita7]

It is not working on colab.

[sx-meng]

Just hit the tab key after typing \alpha

It does not seem to work in nterat with Julia kernel. How to type a Greek letter in nterat with IJulia? Thanks.