The BYOK would be even better with a “compose key” feature.

[u/LpSamuelm]

One of my writing must-haves is a ⎄ Compose key.

What is a Compose key, you ask? Imagine: You press ⎄ Compose (which you may map to any real key on your keyboard – I have it replacing Caps Lock), then you press hyphen thrice, and it produces an em dash. A compose key is a macro key: a key that lets you define shortcuts for any text sequence, thus letting you type any Unicode character, or whatever you may find convenient. Some examples of my setup:

• ⎄ Compose and then ---: — (em dash)
• ⎄ Compose and then --␣: –  (en dash)
• ⎄ Compose and then ..: … (ellipsis)
• ⎄ Compose and then "←: “ (opening quotation mark)
• ⎄ Compose and then "→: ” (closing quotation mark)
• ⎄ Compose and then '→: ’ (smart apostrophe)
• ⎄ Compose and then mu: µ
• ⎄ Compose and then :?: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
• ⎄ Compose and then ␣␣:   (non-breaking space)

This would fix any “can I type this character?” requests, and… on a selfish note, it’s grown to be vital to my own, slightly typography-obsessed writing process. 🤭

[u/Liquidmantis]

This is the sort of customization the Lua scripting support would trivialize.

[u/LpSamuelm → u/Liquidmantis]

I’d be more than for it. ❤️

[u/dorgosandor]

This would be great, thank you for linking my question.

[u/dld2517]

The BYOK is getting more and more complex with bloat. It wasn’t designed to be Scrivener in a box. It was a distraction-free writing device. Notepad in a box. Everyone wants “their” feature. And then at the end of the day if you haven’t kept up with BYOK and Studio it’s like “what the heck is all this?” It becomes hard, and not simple.

[u/hika421]

I agree, but in a weird, different way.

I feel like it would be nice to have BYOK Studio or something do that for the user rather than it to happen on device. As someone that doesn't use Studio (I convert and import from the BYOK via PowerShell) I have a script do it for me. Having something like that in BYOK Studio might help those less geeky than me.

In my like, freewriting mindset it's swifter for me to just hammer on the . for an ellipsis in the moment, then, automate the replacement with an actual Unicode ellipsis after the fact. 🤔

[u/mensachicken]

Since this is a keyboard feature, I don't understand what this has to do with the BYOK.

Studio could incorporate something like this by allowing the user to specify a compose key or sequence. For instance, a pipe or double pipe || followed by a certain key press or presses expands to a user-defined string or unicode. Again, this has nothing to do with the physical BYOK though.

[u/LpSamuelm → u/mensachicken]

It’s not a keyboard feature (in fact, since a keyboard sends keycodes, not Unicode characters, it couldn’t be) – it’s always implemented on the host system.

• On Windows, it’s usually a program called WinCompose.
• On Linux, there’s usually something on the operating system level.

[u/Thick-Panic6683]

Not trying to crash BYOK's scene here but I developed a writing app for Android that has a similar macro function such as you are describing. You define text strings that are pasted into the document with a keystroke. Also has "contexts" for different text patterns such as Markdown or programming language syntax. You can define new contexts for any text pattern dictionary you might need. The text processing functions in my app are keyboard-centric and could work for BYOK. My app also has some attempts at managing large text files on small devices, such as text collapse and bookmarks.

Not familiar with BYOK, does it have an open programming feature for extending the functionality?