Post by @gumnos@bsd.cafe

Minor quibble, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out why I cannot produce a valid em dash ("—", a.k.a. 0xe28094 or U+2014) on #NetBSD, except with mate-terminal. I've tried (u)xterm, alacritty, and lxterminal, and they all either give me a junk character, or an en-dash followed by a hyphen. When I press the compose key and hit the hyphen three times, it immediately attempts to produce an en-dash after the first two hyphen presses, and then gives me a plain hyphen on top of it.

I've checked the Compose file, and it's set up correctly (as far as I can tell).

I think #OpenBSD has the exact same problem, but I haven't tried installing mate-terminal to find out.

cc: @gumnos

@rl_dane

In my ~/.xsession file I have

export QT_IM_MODULE=xim
export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim

which neighboring comments suggest were added to make certain programs aware of the X input-mode (I *think* that's what the "xim" means). So I don't know if one or the other of those before launching $TERMINAL would give you better success. Also, does it (still?) work in plain ol' xterm vs the other more exotic terminals? I tested again in my fairly stock OpenBSD+xterm and got the expected results:

$ hexdump -C <<EOF
em-dash: —
en-dash: –
shy: ­
EOF
00000000 65 6d 2d 64 61 73 68 3a 20 e2 80 94 0a 65 6e 2d |em-dash: ....en-|
00000010 64 61 73 68 3a 20 e2 80 93 0a 73 68 79 3a 20 c2 |dash: ....shy: .|
00000020 ad 0a |..|
00000022

(to test NetBSD, I'd have to swap drives on that OpenBSD junker laptop to put the NetBSD drive in 😆)