Quick Accent: add own accented letters and edit the existing ones

[watchmakerful]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Ability to add, edit or reorder the accented characters in a text configuration file (or directly in the Settings form).

Scenario when this would be used?

Frequent usage of custom characters like ð, φ or π (especially as math symbols), or unusual diacritics like ę or ő.

Supporting information

No response

[Jay-o-Way]

AutoHotkey could do this without breaking a sweat!

[watchmakerful]

One more resident app on my PC? Nope...

[bveldkamp]

This was the first thing I thought about when trying out Q.A. Where are special characters such as ±, ², ©, ° etc.

[Jay-o-Way]

@bveldkamp @watchmakerful There's an obvious answer for that: those are not accents. Doesn't mean they can't be added in the future, but Q.A. was designed for letters.
As I said, Autohotkey can do this - and when you script it, you set it up for personal needs - but using that (or not) is a personal choice.

[watchmakerful]

What about "ð"? Is it considered an accented version of "d"?

[bveldkamp]

@bveldkamp @watchmakerful There's an obvious answer for that: those are not accents. Doesn't mean they can't be added in the future, but Q.A. was designed for letters. As I said, Autohotkey can do this - and when you script it, you set it up for personal needs - but using that (or not) is a personal choice.

Sure, there are all sorts of utilities that can do many things. But we are talking about PowerToys here, aren't we? :-) Besides, Autohotkey could do accents as well I guess, so we wouldn't need Quick Accents at all then.

If you want, I can make another feature request / idea to rename Quick Accents to Quick Characters or whatever. The point is that we give enhancement ideas here, and that's what this is. Enhance Quick Accents to include more characters.

[martixy]

OP made a very barebones request, so here's my attempt to add useful information and considerations:

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Currently the mapping between keys and symbols is hardcoded in a file in the program's source code:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/blob/main/src/modules/poweraccent/PowerAccent.Core/Languages.cs

There exist many issues and open pull requests with the sole purpose of adding additional characters to the accent map.

It would be rather convenient to allow the user to configure user-defined overrides in a manner not dissimilar to how they are already defined in code - a simple language->key->possible characters structure.

Scenario when this would be used?

Rather than relying on the process of code contribution to a massive repository, blind luck or everlasting patience, a user who needs a specific character to be more easily accessible would be able to quickly reconfigure the program to achieve their goal.

There is currently no (obvious) documentation that says which symbols are accessible where (apart from looking at the code). Rather than trying to divine how a symbol might be accessed, a user may simply bind characters to the key that makes the most sense to them.

Supporting information

Conflicts with future changes should be minimal - if the defaults change on update, the worst case is that the user ends up with duplicate characters on seperate keys. (Duplicates on same key can easily be filtered out.)

Frankly I'd be happy with little more than a less code-y text file. YAML or even Markdown seem good options.
E.g.

currencies:
    letter_B: [ ฿, в ]
    letter_C: [ ¢, ₡, č ]
    letter_D: [ ₫ ]
    letter_E: [ € ]
    letter_F: [ ƒ ]
    letter_H: [ ₴ ]
    letter_K: [ ₭ ]
    letter_L: [ ł ]
    letter_N: [ л ]
    letter_M: [ ₼ ]
    letter_P: [ £, ₽ ]
    letter_R: [ ₹, ៛, ﷼ ]
    letter_S: [ $, ₪ ]
    letter_T: [ ₮, ₺, ₸ ]
    letter_W: [ ₩ ]
    letter_Y: [ ¥ ]
    letter_Z: [ z ]

This can also obviate discussions on whether a specific symbol or group should be added. Such as #21589 The emoji panel is mentioned in this issue. Its problem is that while emoji are searchable by name/description, symbols are not (at least on Win10), even though they have descriptive unicode names.

[cinderbdt]

I didn't find this issue until after I had already opened a documentation issue for this, because it seemed like something so basic to have a PowerToy for keyboard shortcuts be customizable. Of course, it isn't that simple because now there is untrusted input to sanitize. I suppose anyone who wanted to sign their own binary could edit the file @martixy pointed out and recompile.

[CarlGao4]

I think this can be achieved based on the new design of #21261
It makes it easier to add new buttons and show up a new dialog to edit the symbols