who is that character?

Source

If I want to type $a \times b$ without spelling out \times, here in this lovely magical future, I should just be able to type ×. There are different ways to do such things. What are they? Of course there are websites. But I want command-line tools.

Well, I can always use hexdump — once I've remembered how to use hexdump. But all that tells me are bytes, which I can never interpret.

There's uniname, from uniutils, which does things like

$ echo +×⋅/÷= | uniname
character  byte       UTF-32   encoded as     glyph   name
        0          0  00002B   2B             +      PLUS SIGN
        1          1  0000D7   C3 97          ×      MULTIPLICATION SIGN
        2          3  0022C5   E2 8B 85       ⋅      DOT OPERATOR
        3          6  00002F   2F             /      SOLIDUS
        4          7  0000F7   C3 B7          ÷      DIVISION SIGN
        5          9  00003D   3D             =      EQUALS SIGN
        6         10  00000A   0A                     LINE FEED (LF)

How can I get from these name and encodings to being able to type, rather than paste?

I'm mostly using Linux through the WSL on Microsoft computers. I know about the "alt codes," but there's never a handy enough table of them. The Character Map is a pretty terrible interface — although now that I have a tool for finding names, it might be better.

In some Windows tools, typing alt-X with the cursor next to a hexadecimal number will swap that number for the equivalent Unicode symbol. It works in Notepad. But it doesn't work in the terminal.

Surely there's an emacs command for inserting unicode? Then I'm platform-independent. And of course there is:

On Emacs 23, type Ctrl+X 8 Enter and then the number, followed by Enter. Learned this from Emacs and Unicode Tips, which describes other methods too. (Ctrl+X 8 Enter can be followed by Unicode name as well.)

There are indeed other methods, including

  • Accents. C-x ' e gives é, and C-x 8 ~ n gives ñ.

  • Related characters, like C-x 8 x for × and C-x 8 S for §.

  • Emoji! (in Emacs 29, which is newer than what I'm running here.)

  • M-x set-input-method to just plain type in some other language.

Whoa, I think that emoji are silly enough for me to figure out the backports setup again. … And now, C-x 8 ee pulls up an emoji menu 🙃!