Re: keyboard macro

[Rustom Mody]

On Monday, October 21, 2013 10:05:51 PM UTC+5:30, Christof Spitz wrote:
> 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?
> 

After evaluating the below code, do C-x RET C-\ diacritic-for-devanagari
--------------------
(require 'quail)

(quail-define-package
 "diacritic-for-devanagari" "UTF-8" "अ" t
 "Example diacritic

" nil t t nil t nil nil nil nil nil t)

(quail-define-rules
 ("..a" ?ā)
 ;; add the rest here
)