Post by @rl_dane@polymaths.social
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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 Here on Linux, /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose has EN DASH as <minus> <minus> <period> and EM DASH as <minus> <minus> <minus>.
If you are using a Compose file with EN DASH as just <minus> <minus>, that probably confuses Compose implementations that can't handle when one compose sequence is a prefix of another.
I believe GTK does not use the standard X11 compose implementation (in particular, GTK does not support mappings where the right-hand-side contains multiple code points) so if you've found a difference between GTK-based apps and other apps, that might be why.
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Hmm, should I just remove the en dash from the Compose file on my (Net|Open)BSD boxen, then?
@rl_dane I'm guessing it's probably not a thing you type often. If it's coming from your personal ~/.Xcompose file rather than some system-wide file, it's probably easiest just to delete it (or at least comment it out).
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No, it's the default Compose file for en_US.UTF-8. And I do use it a good bit! XD