keyboard macro

[Christof Spitz]

Hello,

I have to write special characters for transliteration of a non-european
language (devanagari) in Emacs. These include characters like ā,ī,ū,ś,ṣ etc.
Basically this has become easy since Emacs supports Unicode. The question is how
to enter those special characters easily. In Windows, I use a scripting program
called "AutoHotKey". I defined macros so that, for example, when I write "..a"
it will insert "ā" etc. In Emacs, I was not able to define such macros. I have
to use the "function keys" such as f5, or Ctrl or Alt (Meta), so that I have to
enter f5-a to produce ā, for example. That makes the typewriting slow. If I
define a macro instead, it needs to finish the string "..a" with a space to
"trigger" the insert, but this is not what I want.

So my question: Is there a way to define a macro/keyboard function that will
insert a certain character at the point when I write "..x" (not followed by a
space)?

Or should I better look for a Linux scripting program that works similar to
AutoHotKey in Windows?

Thanks for any hints,
Christof

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Christof Spitz
Opitzstr. 6a
22301 Hamburg
phone +49 40 38636135
mobile +49 172 9008988