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I would like to deal with floral formulae by my DSL coded in groovy, so I need some special symbols such as female sign and Superscripts and Subscripts.

Thanks to the great answers that I found on stackoverflow questions like this now I'm able to insert special unicode symbols in source code in VIM (MacVim) this way:

CTRL+V. U 2 6 4 0.

However, I would like to be able to do the same in Eclipse IDE (I'm trying to use Groovy/Grails Tool Suite Version: 3.1.0.RELEASE to develop a grails project)

Question: How can I insert in the Eclipse editor a 4 digit unicode symbol by knowing the encoding ( without cut & paste from another source) ?

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Franco Rondini
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1 Answers1

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There appear to be a few ways to get the unicode characters on a Mac. The first few don't appear to be what you want exactly, but included for completeness.

1) Make sure System Preferences->Keyboard "show keyboard & character viewers in menu bar" is selected. Then you can click on that (normally accessible via option+cmd+T, but not in eclipse) to get the Character Viewer. You can then double-click a special character you want and it should insert at cursor.

2) Under the default setup, you should be able to click Option + key to get an alternate character. Use the keyboard viewer from #1 to see what maps to what. Note you can switch to some more mappings using Shift at the same time. This will only get you a subset of unicode characters.

3) From here: Under System Preferences->Languages & Text, go to Input Sources tab. Select the Unicode Hex Input source. You may need to assign switching input sources (under System Prefs->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts->Keyboard) to a hotkey combo (default probably conflicts with spotlight, so change to something else). After that, you should be able to use said hotkey combo to switch to the Unicode Input Source - in that mode, you can hold Option down and enter a hex 4-digit key code, which will result in the character being placed at cursor.

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Brian Henry
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