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Moving away from using gnome-terminal and terminator since they are excruciatingly slow. (20-30 seconds to change focus to them for whatever reason)
xterm is nice and fast. However, I need to be able to type certain unicode characters in vim for documents I am working on. With gnome-terminal and terminator I could do ctrl+shift+u + hex code, however that does not work in xterm.
How do I type arbitrary unicode characters in xterm?
OS is Debian 8.
Thanks!
xterm doesn't implement a hexadecimal-input feature because all of the text editors which handle UTF-8 provide their own equivalents (emacs, vim and vile, of course, even nano). This could be useful in a shell script, but is not often mentioned. The feature was first implemented in Windows, of course.
To enter multibyte (e.g., UTF-8) characters in xterm, you would use compose sequences. As a special case, the meta key can be used as a sort of shift to get the 128-255 coverage of UTF-8, but aside from that, compose is what works.
gnome-terminal (more properly VTE), also implements compose, although there are some differences.
Further reading:
As Thomas Dickey explains, xterm has no built-in way to input characters by codepoint. (Presumably because that's pretty bad UX.)
Vim does, though: in insert mode, press Ctrl+V then u then 4 hex digits (or Ctrl+V then U then 8 hex digits). For a more convenient way to input characters, use Compose, digraphs (which are Vim's built-in compose facility), or an input method suited to the language you're writing in.
