Question

I was searching for at solution that could provide me a Faroese input method for use in Emacs 23.1.1. That is what I want.

The faroese-keyboard input method does not exist in Emacs. It will be necessary to use a modified version of the Danish-keyboard. The Danish keyboard is mostly similar to Faroese keyboard. Only two keys differ, one of which is a dead key for typing a vowel with acute, the other is the Eth letter.

Can you provide instructions for manually copying and modifying a keyboard layout for use in Emacs?

I use Emacs on the Cygwin/x platform for M$ Windows.

Thanks for your time.

Gunnar Vestergaard

Answer 1

It’s fairly easy to take one of the existing Danish input methods and modify it for Faroese. There are several different Danish input methods available. The “danish-keyboard” one is based on the SUN Danish keyboard layout and may not be a good general-purpose choice unless one is very familiar with that keyboard layout. The “danish-postfix” input method is the one that I chose as the basis for the following Faroese input method:

(quail-define-package
 "faroese-postfix" "Latin-1" "FA<" t
 "Faroese input method (rule: AE -> Æ, OE -> Ø, AA -> Å, E' -> É)

Doubling the postfix separates the letter and postfix: e.g. aee -> ae
"
 nil t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t)

(quail-define-rules
 ("AE" ?Æ)
 ("ae" ?æ)
 ("OE" ?Ø)
 ("oe" ?ø)
 ("AA" ?Å)
 ("aa" ?å)
 ("DD" ?Ð)
 ("dd" ?ð)
 ("E'" ?É)
 ("e'" ?é)
 ("A'" ?Á)
 ("a'" ?á)
 ("I'" ?Í)
 ("i'" ?í)
 ("Y'" ?Ý)
 ("y'" ?ý)
 ("O'" ?Ó)
 ("o'" ?ó)
 ("U'" ?Ú)
 ("u'" ?ú)

 ("AEE" ["AE"])
 ("aee" ["ae"])
 ("OEE" ["OE"])
 ("oee" ["oe"])
 ("AAA" ["AA"])
 ("aaa" ["aa"])
 ("DDD" ["DD"])
 ("ddd" ["dd"])
 ("E''" ["E'"])
 ("e''" ["e'"])
 ("A''" ["A'"])
 ("a''" ["a'"])
 ("I''" ["I'"])
 ("i''" ["i'"])
 ("Y''" ["Y'"])
 ("y''" ["y'"])
 ("O''" ["O'"])
 ("o''" ["o'"])
 ("U''" ["U'"])
 ("u''" ["u'"])
 )

I added in the accented vowels and the “Eth” letter that weren’t present in the danish-postfix input method.

If you put the above code in your Emacs init file, you will be able to use it by pressing:

C-\

and specifying “faroese-postfix” as the input method.

If you press:

M-xdescribe-input-methodRETfaroese-postfixRET

you will get a description of the key bindings for this input method.

If you prefer to write your own Faroese input method based on the “danish-keyboard” input method instead of using the “faroese-postfix” code above, you can install it in your Emacs init file in a similar manner to what I described above.