Add keyboard shortcuts for symbols

[kcrisman]

From one of the TAs at AIMS - apparently in some software (e.g. Mma, but probably others) there are escape sequences/shortcuts that can be used to get non-ASCII variable names easily. The example was "Esc, eta, Esc" giving Eta in Mma.

Implementing this in the sagenb is probably too ambitious at this point, but maybe in a .sagews this wouldn't be a bad idea. Or something analogous that is more 'native' to SMC. Anyway, an idea.

[williamstein]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 9:53 AM, kcrisman notifications@github.com wrote:

From one of the TAs at AIMS - apparently in some software (e.g. Mma, but
probably others) there are escape sequences/shortcuts that can be used to
get non-ASCII variable names easily. The example was "Esc, eta, Esc" giving
Eta in Mma.

Unfortunately, Python2 doesn't support non-ascii variable names.

Implementing this in the sagenb is probably too ambitious at this point,
but maybe in a .sagews this wouldn't be a bad idea. Or something
analogous that is more 'native' to SMC. Anyway, an idea.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#185.

William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[kcrisman]

Hmm, but maybe the variable name could still be ascii but the visual version for the user (including cut-and-paste) could be non-ascii? Just brainstorming.

[haraldschilly]

summary: in the codecells of a sagews, dynamically replace all greek sounding variable names with a corresponding UTF-8 symbol. I'm not sure how well that works, but it's doable.

[kcrisman]

Well, it was just a suggestion from a user. Perhaps something one could switch on or off...