Add a visible § key to the shifted symbols page - #2621
Conversation
§ was only available as popup of ¶, where users have trouble finding it (see HeliBorg#1445). Add it as a visible key in the second row, which has one key less than the first row anyway. § is a standard character on German and Nordic physical keyboard layouts. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One single user had this issue a year ago
How about other characters that are on other countries' keyboards but only reachable via popup in Heliboard? |
That's exactly the right question, and it convinced me this PR takes the wrong approach: adding § to the shared page privileges one region, and doing the same for every country's characters would clutter it for everyone. The systematic answer is to make the symbols page region-specific instead of extending the shared one: #2681 gives German/Nordic subtypes § as a direct key (it's Shift+3 on their physical keyboards), and every other wired region gets its own characters the same way — while the shared default page stays untouched. Closing this in favour of #2681. |
2 participants
What
Adds
§as a visible key in the second row of the shifted symbols page (layouts/more_symbols/symbols_shifted.txt), next to the pilcrow¶it was already grouped with:Why
§is currently only reachable as a long-press popup of¶. As #1445 shows, this is very hard to discover – the reporter there had "tried every single key and looked also for the pop-ups" and still missed it, and only found it after being told.§is a standard, directly-visible character on German and Nordic physical keyboard layouts and is common in legal/administrative text, so a visible key improves discoverability for a fairly common character.The second row of the shifted symbols page has one key less than the first row, so there is room to add it without crowding or reflowing the layout.
¶keeps its§popup, so nothing is lost for existing users.Notes
testRunTestsUnitTest(incl.LayoutTest/ParserTest) passes, and I verified on an emulator that the new key renders on the shifted symbols page and inputs§.Refs #1445.