Can I Insert Symbols using a Shortcut Keys, just like in MS Word ?

Vasile Caraus

I want to add diacritics marks / accent marks to a text written in Romanian. Example: ş,ţ,î,ă,â,Ș,Ţ, but I want to use key combinations, exactly as I defined in Ms Word.

Shif + a = ă
Shit + t = ţ

Etc. Can this be done in notepad++?

+++++++
Vreau să adaug diacritice la un text scris în limba română. Exemplu: ş,ţ,î,ă,â,Ș,Ţ, dar vreau să folosesc combinaţii de taste, exact cum am definit în Ms Word.

Shif + a = ă
Shit + t = ţ

Etc. Se poate face aşa ceva în notepad++?

Coises

@Vasile-Caraus

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to do this in Notepad++ “just like in MS Word.”

If you use these characters often, I suggest looking for a more “global” solution — one that will let you use the same key sequences in (almost) any program.

It will get a bit off-topic to go too far into that, but two places you could look are:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/keyboard-manager (quick and free, but not that comprehensive)

http://www.kbdedit.com/ (flexible, but takes a lot of work, and full version isn’t free)

If you really need to type a wide range of accented characters, you almost certainly will need to set up one or more dead keys. The second option above can do that. You might find what you need already created and available, for free, on their examples page.

PeterJones

@Vasile-Caraus said in Can I Insert Symbols using a Shortcut Keys, just like in MS Word ?:

Shift + a = ă
Shift + t = ţ

Etc. Can this be done in notepad++?

With those exact keystrokes? No. Because Shift+a is the way to type A and Shift+t is the way to type T – Shift capitalizes existing letters. I would be very much surprised if there were any way in MS Word to have Shift+letter do a diacritc. (Unless there’s a translation error, and you meant the word for Ctrl or Alt instead of Shift) (As far as I know, and as seen here, to enter diacritics in MS Word, you enter something like Ctrl+Shift+^ then the letter a to input â, or more generically, type the hex code then hit Alt+X to get the character at that Unicode hex codepoint – for example, ă is U+0103, so you can type 0103 then Alt+X)

Notepad++ doesn’t have anything like that built in.

However, if you can find an available keyboard shortcut that would be memorable for you and doesn’t conflict with an existing keystroke, then you could create a macro to insert the character. For example, the following macro uses Ctrl+Shift+a to enter ă:

        <Macro name="a breve" Ctrl="yes" Alt="no" Shift="yes" Key="65">
            <Action type="1" message="2170" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="ă" />
        </Macro>

You would open %AppData%\Notpead++\shortcuts.xml, copy the Macro and paste it into the Macros section, save, and exit/restart Notepad++; after that, Ctrl+Shift+a will run that macro and type the ă character. You could make similar macros for the others you use, giving them the appropriate shortcuts. (After pasting all the macros, saving, and restarting, you could use the Shortcut Mapper to edit the shortcuts; if you see conflicts – which Shortcut Mapper will make obvious – you could either pick a different shortcut for your diacritic macro, or you can see where Shortcut Mapper says the conflict is, and change-or-delete the shortcut on the other action, instead.)

If you want a more generic solution, similar to MS Word’s “hex then Alt+X”, I have script for the PythonScript plugin: pyscReplaceBackslashSequence.py, which I assign to Alt+\, which allows me to type something like \U+1F61E or \x{1F61E} or 😞 then hit my Alt+\ shortcut, and it will convert it from the codepoint / entity into the actual character (and it handles the surrogate pair calculation inside the script). To install such a script, follow the instructions in our using-PythonScript FAQ.

rdipardo

@PeterJones said in Can I Insert Symbols using a Shortcut Keys, just like in MS Word ?:

I have script for the PythonScript plugin: pyscReplaceBackslashSequence.py, which I assign to Alt+\, which allows me to type something like \U+1F61E or \x{1F61E} or 😞 then hit my Alt+\ shortcut, and it will convert it from the codepoint / entity into the actual character (and it handles the surrogate pair calculation inside the script).

Another plugin with similar functionality and a quicker setup is HTML Tag.

Current versions can also (de/en)code Unicode scalars in the U+010000 to U+10FFFF range: