Re: EURO patch
On Wed, Nov 25, 1998 at 12:45:03PM +0100, Richard Braakman wrote:
> Enrique Zanardi wrote:
> > For those of you not aware of european news, the countries that have
> > joined the European Union are moving towards a common currency, called
> > the "euro". For Linux that means we have to include a new symbol in our
> > charsets, and map it to some key (Meta-e, IIRC) in our keymaps. And we
> > must do it soon, as the transition from the old to the new currency is
> > starting next January, and will be finished in two years.
>
> Argl. Meta-e is a-ring, a common Swedish letter. Couldn't they have
> picked something more obscure? Replacing the pound symbol would have
> been good; the pound will be replaced anyway. *duck*
So will the euro... eventually, IMHO. Either it will fail, or global
currency unification will eventually happen, at which point the name "Euro"
will sound pitifully inappropriate for such a currency, wheras dollar,
pound, etc. are geographically neutral names. The point is, even if it is
(which I doubt it will be in the near future), that doesn't mean the symbol
should be made inaccessible. Especially since many keyboards will still have
the pound symbol on that key.
Anyway, back to the point, I've seen some very recent UK keyboards that put
it on the "4" key, alongside "$" (in the AltGr "position"), so we should map
(at least in uk.map) AltGr+4 to the Euro symbol.
Besides, why does the EURO matter? The only currency symbol that currently
works on my keyboard (under Linux) is the dollar, and I imagine that this
is the case for many others. Shift-3 produces £, but this doesn't usually
display as pound on my machine, and rather sends some nasty escapes to
eg bash. We should fix both of these at once.
--
Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk> <tom@debian.org> http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/
PGP Key: finger tom@master.debian.org, http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/pgpkeys.asc.
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