Linux 101 stuff. Questions are encouraged, noobs are welcome!
Linux introductions, tips and tutorials. Questions are encouraged. Any distro, any platform! Explicitly noob-friendly.
Is a blank character different from pressing the spacebar?
Yes, but it mostly depends how it's interpreted by a given program. Some will interpret it as a character being there, but it may take up no space on the screen, for example. Some will show a space, but won't count it as a space character so it can bypass some text restrictions. Some may show different spacing. Many will also simply not accept them as valid characters.
I believe Lemmy removed your blank character?
At least, it doesn't seem to show up when I try to select it or navigate around it with arrow keys, nor does the formatting look unusual.
It's usually possible to type Unicode characters by just inputting their codepoint/number. This kind of varies between desktop environments, but how it works for GNOME (and possibly others) is described here: https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/tips-specialchars.html.en#ctrlshiftu
Alternatively, you can also change your keyboard layout to include it. On X11, you'd do that with Xmodmap. Looks like there are some alternatives for Wayland, but I don't know what to recommend there.
Well, and another option would be to write a script which copies that character to your clipboard and then create a keyboard shortcut to call that script.
For copying to the clipboard, you can use xclip on X11 and wl-clipboard on Wayland.
Thank you very much! I'll try this when I get home tonight.
FYI you can "separate lines" by simply adding two newlines by pressing Return twice.
Like this.
My go-to would be AutoHotKey on Windows. Maybe this Linux version would work? https://github.com/phil294/AHK_X11
Looks like you can get a script that replaces
; hotstrings - expand 'btw' to 'By the way' as you type
::btw::By the way
; hotkeys - press winkey-z to go to Google
#z::Run http://google.com
You might be able to use whatever character you're using instead of {Space}:
F19::{Space}
I'm pretty sure that two end lines will give you the space on lemmy.
Like on Reddit