Friday, March 25, 2022

How to add / edit characters in the "Press and hold" character picker in OS X Monterey

I'd like to add some additional characters to the "Press and hold" popup that shows up if I long press a a letter on the keyboard. I also need to change the position of some of the additional characters. The keyboard layout that I use is English, so I'll modify the press&hold options for this layout.

What I have for "s" now:

What I need:
 


Step 1. Copy the PressAndHold.app from the system folder into the user folder

(Since OS X Monterey won't let you easily modify any file that is under the system folder).

Open Finder
Press "shift + command + G"
Enter "
/System/Library/Input Methods"
Find and copy the "PressAndHold.app"

Press "shift + command + G"
Enter "/Library/Input Methods"
Paste the "PressAndHold.app"

Step 2. Open and edit the file with additional characters in your user folder

Open Finder
Press "shift + command + G"
Enter "Library/Input Methods/PressAndHold.app/Contents/PlugIns/PAH_Extension.appex/Contents/Resources"

Locate the file "Keyboard-en.plist"
Make a backup of the file just in case (there is always a read-only version under the system folder anyway, though)
Edit the file to your liking (change the order of additional characters, add a new character or whole new section for a key, etc.)
Save the changes

Step 3. Log out and log back in for the changes to take effect

The updated PressAndHold character picker should now work per your changes.

Note. Most probably this would only work for your user, but not other users on the same machine. But updating the PressAndHold menu in the System folder would require too much hassle with permissions, write access to the driver, etc.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

How to successfully install MSKLC on Windows 10

So you downloaded the (quiet dated) Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator from the official website
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339. And then you try to install it on Windows 10, and the installer says there are some unsatisfied dependencies and tells you to download .Net 2.0.5 (which is very outdated and has reached its end of life and unsupported). You click on the link, go to the Microsoft website and start downloading different .Net stuff, install it and the MSKLC installer keeps stopping at the same step where you have to download the .Net framework O_o. All dependencies should now be satisfied but the installer still doesn't work. At least this is what happened to me.

So here is how to solve this -- it turns out the older .Net frameworks are already included into Windows 10. All we have to do is to enable them. Phew, everything seems way easier:

  1. press the window key and start typing -- "Turn Windows Features on and off"
  2. launch that applet
  3. check the .NET Framework 3.5 (includes .NET 2.0 and 3.0) option
  4. follow the instruction and let the system download the missing files
  5. when downloading is done, launch the MSKLC installer again -- bingo! It now installs successfully.



Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Gnome Shell - disable tracker

There is a very handy package that allows disabling Gnome Shell Tracker:

tracker-preferences

Install it, launch it and see the options it has. I uncheck anything that tells Tracker to index my files (which - indexing on - in my case makes my computer hang up badly).

Friday, May 22, 2015

Flash plugin in Chromium

The only real reason that made me install Google Chrome on Linux was that it came with flash plugin. And Chromium has no flash by default.

To have Flash plugin on Chromium it's sufficient to install pepperflashplugin-nonfree from the distro's repos (in my case it's sudo apt-get install pepperflashplugin-nonfree). That's it. No need for Chrome anymore.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

XFCE / Xubuntu - how take a screenshot of a screen area

By default the XFCE that is shipped in Xubuntu (as of Xubuntu 15.04) allows you to press the PrintScreen button and capture the whole screen and press alt + PrintScreen to capture the window in focus. Well, this is obviously not enough. People do need to be able to capture just a portion of the screen, it's an as frequent use case as capturing the whole screen (in my particular case it's even the most frequent use case).

But thanks to the developers of the default screenshot program in XFCE (whatever it is), there is a possibility to make screenshots of a selected screen region - we'll just have to quickly set-up a shortcut for it:

Menu => Settings => Keyboard => Application shortcut => Add => type the command:

xfce4-screenshooter -r

=> press the keys you want to be the shortcut for this action (for me it Shift + PrintScreen) => done.

(Or one could simply run the command xfce4-screenshooter -r by pressing alt + F2 to take a screenshot of an area, but it's obviously faster to create a shortcut).

Friday, May 15, 2015

How to launch 2 Skype instances on Linux

Here is how to launch several Skype instances on Linux (I currently run Skype 4.3 for Linux):

Alt+F2
skype --secondary

Pretty easy and really convenient =)

Thursday, April 30, 2015

How to disable window animations on Gnome Shell 3.14 and higher

Launch dconf-editor

Go to the following sections of it:
org => gnome => desktop => interface => uncheck enable-animations

However on my system the windows started moving so briskly with the effects disabled that I actually had to enable them back.