Ubuntu – Typing “↑” (upwards arrow) with a keyboard shortcut

gnomekeyboardkeyboard-layoutshortcut-keys

When I'm programming, I find useful to use some unicode symbol like ← ↓ → to indicate in comments different things.

In ubuntu I can type ← ↓ → respectively with ALT GR + Y, ALT GR + U, ALT GR + I.

But to get the symbol "↑" I have to type CTRL + SHIFT + U , and then 2191 (i.e. I have to insert the unicode code).

Is there a shortcut for the upwards arrow? If there isn't, how could I manually add it?

Best Answer

If you look at the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/latin, you will find the following lines:

key <AD06>  { [         y,          Y,    leftarrow,          yen ] };
key <AD07>  { [         u,          U,    downarrow,      uparrow ] };
key <AD08>  { [         i,          I,   rightarrow,     idotless ] };
key <AD06>  { [         z,          Z,    leftarrow,          yen ] };

So apparently an up arrow (↑) is already defined -- for ALT GR+SHIFT+U. If not, you can copy the file to a directory, edit it at will, name the profile somehow (say "foo" instead of "latin") and simply run

setxkbmap -I. -layout foo

(the -I. makes setxkbmap look for layout files also in the current directory).

The four strings assign to each key give the four characters that are produced by pressing the key, key with shift, key with altgr and key with algr+shift. The names of the entities (keysyms) that xkb can recognize can be found here.