I took the liberty to read a couple of your previous HN threads, and from context there's a chance you're living in US and you are an English native speaker.
Forgive me if the above is incorrect, but in case it is:
The majority of your world's fellow humans, wishing to be comp developers, already spent months or years (combined) of their individual lives in order to learn English as non-native-speakers to do just that.
Your "whining" (yes, it's intended to be somewhat impolite, but I don't think it's unreasonable given the above) that, in case Ć becomes the next-gen well-known programming tool, you'll have to spend maybe a couple of hours to update your keyboard mapping or learn some other way of quickly typping 'Ć' invokes 0 of my (and many others') empathy. Though many were helpful to suggest you how to do that quickly/correctly.
I hope my words will be deemed as 'fair enough given the context' :)
I highly recommend using a compose key to enter special characters. I think it's more common by default on Linux, but I use WinCompose. I've never entered "ć" in my life, but hitting ALT, apostrophe then c, it worked.
On Mac, hold down the "c" key and a little menu with accented versions (ç, ć, č) appears, with numbers to choose which one. The flip side is that holding down letters or numbers doesn't repeat them on a Mac.
Hmm, I get ´c when doing option-e c. I feel like it should work to combine the two, but ... Looks like that functionality only applies to the vowels (and not y): á´b´c´dé´f´g´hí´j´k´l´m´nó´p´q´r´s´tú´v´w´x´y´z.
I'm not seeing that behavior; my letter/number keys simply repeat. But I'm sure I've seen it before. I guess there may be an option somewhere to enable/disable it, but offhand I can't seem to find it.
Or maybe this has changed (back) in a recent OS update? I'm running 12.0beta on this machine.
It's been around since Lion or Mountain Lion, IIRC. There's a toggle in keyboard settings to choose between repeating or hold-for-alternate behavior (like how iOS works). The substitution behavior is the default, but if you already had repeat mode on it may have carried forward. The old way was option+e and a vowel for an accute accent mark, but I don't think that works with consonants.
Yes, I expected a toggle in the keyboard settings, but I can't seem to find one on Monterey. (What exactly is it labeled, and where located? Maybe I'm just being blind...)
The dead-keys like Opt-E for acute only work with a small set of letters in the standard US keyboard layout, although it's possible for a different layout to support more -- subject to the combinations existing as precomposed characters in Unicode. (For other combinations, you'd need to enter a combining accent after the letter, and rely on the font to supports placing it properly.)
Not exactly. {, }, [, ], (, ) are not part of the English alphabet but they are widely used. Same thing for ->, =>, !=. But things like λ are not used at all. So the alphabet of computing is ASCII.
You are supposed to be able to type them if you write in English. Also, if you are in polite company, it's alright to drop the occasional Greek word. So here we are: if you can fully write in English, you can use all these characters.
Ascii-only is the modern equivalent of all-caps. Something archaic, still used by old people with hopelessly limited input devices.
