A quick and convenient pop-up interface that allows you to search for and type Unicode characters.
The ready-made files can be downloaded from the releases page (choose character-picker-YY-MM-DD.zip
).
The exe
file must be run in the same folder as the characters.txt
file.
In order to be useful, you should bind a keyboard shortcut to execute the character
picker so that you can quickly access it anywhere on demand. For instance, you could
download AutoHotKey and create a script (.ahk
file) that runs on
system startup.
Here is an example of such a script:
; Runs the program when Ctrl+Win+Space is pressed ; Also see: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Hotkeys.htm ; Important to set the working directory to the same folder as the `characters.txt` file #^Space:: SetWorkingDir c:\Users\luis\mdata\util\character-picker Run "C:\Users\luis\mdata\util\character-picker\picker.exe" Return
After installing AutoHotKey, you can double-click the script file for the shortcuts to
take effect. Then, you can create a shortcut to this file (Ctrl+Shift+drag) and move it to the Start-up
folder which can be accessed by typing shell:startup
into the Run box (Windows+R).
While the program is open, your keystrokes will be captured by the search box.
The search allows exact matches using double quotes (e.g. "latin capital"
),
as well as basic natural query language (e.g. (greek AND letter) OR "latin capital"
).
Note that you may need to type in an entire word before getting any matches.
To type a character, you can click on it or press Enter
to type the selected character.
To change the selection, use the keybindings Ctrl+h
or Shift+Tab
(left), Ctrl+j
(down), Ctrl+k
(up) and Ctrl+l
or Tab
(right).
To close the window, click the cross, press Escape
, or press Ctrl+g
.
You can resize the window and scroll the results if needed.
The characters.txt
has the following format:
- One line per character
- Each line consists of the character, then a space, then a description
Example:
Δ GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA
These descriptions power the search function, so you can modify the description of a character to make it easier to search for. Additionally, you can remove lines with any characters that you do not want to show up, or simply start afresh with a minimal list of useful characters.
This character picker is a simple Rust program that can be built using cargo
.
Note that it depends on a custom version of the druid
crate found here.
The characters.txt
file can be generated from the DerivedName.txt
file which can be downloaded from the Unicode website.
Then, execute extractor/extract_chars.clj
in the same directory using, for instance, Babashka.
Copyright © 2021 Luis Thiam-Nye.
Distributed under Eclipse Public License 2.0, see LICENSE.