A Linux version of Windows “alt codes”

One little feature on Windows that I’ve always liked is “alt codes” , where you hold down the Alt key and tap out a number and get a lovely little Unicode character appearing in your text. And it didn’t really make sense to me that the same thing wasn’t possible on my Linux laptop. Clearly I wasn’t looking hard enough however – a short visit to the local search engine turned up the following on Lord Matt’s blog:

Windows “Alt Codes” for Linux works like this.

Ctrl+Shift+u

Hold down Control and then Shift and press the “u” key. You should get an odd looking character that is waiting for input. Type the numeric code and press space. You can use more than just ASCII but can use hex values too!

That’s certainly much easier than hunting around in the Character Map ^_^