Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week something very special landed for Plasma 6.7: the ability to type characters not on your physical keyboard by pressing-and-holding the keys that it does have:
Love this new feature! This is a very KDE like thing to do! Well done! 
(I hope there will be different ways to make this trigger i.e. through a customizable keyboard shortcut in case someone long presses because they want to repeat a certain keyyyyyyyyy)
Hi, I want to make a new issue (feature request) for plasma-keyboard (add navigation/arrow keys) but I canāt login with my identity.kde.org account to the GitLab. Who do I contact for help? I think it might be because Iām using mozmail email?
Using the Compose key for it would be a good option, since this is replacing that functionality. āeā āComposeā ā popup for āeā
You can submit a sysadmin ticket for login issues.
Filed one, thanks!
I like that idea!
But what if I want to :bbbbbbbbbbbbb ??? 
xDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
This week something very special landed for Plasma 6.7: the ability to type characters not on your physical keyboard by pressing-and-holding the keys that it does have:
In French, there are 42 letters and a few diacritics: I canāt wait to try out this new feature!
Great idea and excellent work.
Well done and thank you to Kristen.
really, right in front of my custom keyboard layout 
seriously this feature sounds like a massive leap in usability, not just for virtual keyboards but for physical ones.
i think the long press trigger needs to be reconsidered as it conflicts with the repeat feature, but the convenience of having a popup to choose the key variant will make for a super good UX.
i like the idea of the compose key but it would seem more appropriate to use the IsoShift (3rd level GrAlt) key since thatās what most keyboard layouts already have you use to access the one or two extra charters per key cap.
this solution would give you, i guess, at least 6 alternatives to your key cap and you wouldnāt need to use the shift key in combo with it since itās all on the pop up.
for instance ISOShift+u+4 would get you a Ćŗ character
i also hope the files that support this can be copied to user space so that we donāt have to go modifying root level files in order to make our own variations of the mapping.
I donāt know what exactly the compose key is, but it sounds like a good idea to meā¦ (i.e. to press a certain modifier key to initiate the popup for the accented characters)
the compose key activates a way to enter a series of key strokes that generate a single character, so for instance i can hit the compose key, then type the letters t, and m to generate the ā¢ characterā¦. compose, c, zero generates the Ā© character.
there is a whole list of these key combinations that can be found in
/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose if you are using the US English for your locale setting.
or you can make your own by creating a ~/.XCompose file in your home dir like so
include "%L"
<Multi_key> <u> <2> <2> <6> <2> : "ā¢" U2262 # NOT IDENTICAL TO
<Multi_key> <u> <3> : "ā¢" U2262 # NOT IDENTICAL TO
this will add the ability to generate the ā¢character by typing compose, u, 3 or by typing compose, u, 2, 2, 6, 2 which is the unicode for that symbol (if you happen to know it).
you can choose which key is the compose key by going to
settings > input devices > keyboard > advanced
and looking for the section labeled Position of Compose key.
Wait waht?? I never knew about this before! 
Although I didnāt see an advanced optionā¦ I found it under: Settings > Keyboard > Key Bindings > Select āConfigure Keyboard Optionsā > Expand āPosition of Compose keyā > Select one of the available options
Thank you so much for this! :D! I can finally type TradeMarkā¢ without having to copy paste it from somewhere!
Now thenā¦ to use my newfound powers responsiblyā¦ 
*opensĀ§ discordā¢ toĀ° spamĀ® friendsĀ©*
The compose key feature is amazing. The only problem is that itās so hidden away.
The idea behind the press-and-hold character palette is to surface the functionality in a more user-visible way. Lots of people are already familiar with this from their phones and MacOS, all of which have the feature. I donāt know about Windows.
We have some documentation about the multiple different ways you can type special characters at Type Characters Not On Your Keyboard - KDE Community . It was written for KDE Linux, but should broadly apply to all Plasma systems (except for details like release schedules and pre-installed apps differing).
wait until you hear about what the
ākey to choose the 3rd levelā
and
ākey to choose the 5th levelā
does.
those can give you access to up to four more characters for each key on your keyboard in addition to the normal and shifted characters that are printed on them.
itās even more convenient than the compose key combo, but more difficult to set upā¦ and best of all it works everywhere while sometimes compose characters do not.
for instance my my qwerty row of keys offers
āāĪµĻĻĻ ĪøĪ¹ĪæĻ
by just holding the 3rd level key, and
āāā®Ī”įÆĪ„ĪāāĪ
by holding both the 3rd level key plus the shift key
you can spam your friends even faster this way 
this new press-n-hold feature will offer similar access for up to 6 additional characters per key
Honestly there are quite a few good features in Plasma that are not immediately obvious to a new user (or even existing users!) perhaps there can be and app, regular blog or short videos showcasing some of the interesting but hidden features that users might be interested inā¦ a sort of āDid you know?ā or āPlasma tips and tricks videosā some quick things that come to mind are āmeta + .ā for the emoji picker and āmeta + vā for a floating clipboard menu. Also maybe a showcase desktop made with several cool widgets that looks awesome and how the user can customise them. I would also include fun stuff like wobbly windows and the like. Once you wobble your windows, you will never be satisfied with un-wobbly windows ever again. 
(sample desktop idea, but you have many talented people that can make something that looks much nicer even)
I amā¦ le speechless. I didnāt know that you could make so many different symbols from each key
I 
% agree with this line of thinking! 
I agree; I had no idea it even existed until I made the full transition from Windows to Arch on my desktop and needed to figure out the alt+0151 (ā) parallel.
WordPerfect introduced easy diacritical compose back in the DOS era of the early 1990sā¦ sure took the rest of you a long time to catch up. 
Seriously, I love these little touches in KDE.
What I donāt love lately is the way a whole lot of KDE.org (notably Invent, but sometimes even application pages) tells me ā403 Forbiddenā and Iām likeā¦ what?? This started 3-4 months ago. I canāt comment on your blog anymore either.
My blog is in not associated with KDE infrastructure at all, so this may be a you problem; I canāt reproduce any of that and itās the first time Iām hearing about it. So it doesnāt seem to be a widespread issue at least. Iād recommend debugging your setup.
