How to make xdotool type Unicode characters

Question

I'm trying to make a shortcut to send, for example, the universal quantifier symbol, ∀ (U+2200). Xdotool's own documentation doesn't really explain this.

wjandrea · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-03T06:08:30.277

11

For the above symbol, there are two options:

Xdotool generates the character and types it:
```
xdotool key U2200
```
The shell (Bash) generates the character, and Xdotool types it:
```
xdotool type $'\u2200'
```

edited Mar 03 '17 at 06:08

answered Mar 02 '15 at 04:14

wjandrea

14,543

Also ctrl+shift+u then 2200 will input a unicode symbol. Or in KDE set a compose sequence to do it. – pbhj Feb 27 '19 at 20:17
@pbhj How would you do that in Xdotool though? – wjandrea May 06 '20 at 16:59

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 04 '22 at 00:49

0

What I ended up doing is:

echo -n "${TEXT}"|xsel -b

xdotool key ctrl+v

This fills the mouse buffer, then pastes it.

edited Dec 04 '22 at 00:49

Nmath

12,744

answered Nov 30 '22 at 08:58

Rich Graham

1

Why not just xdotool type "$TEXT"? And how do you generate the Unicode character in the first place? It's usually a good idea to avoid non-ASCII text in source code. – wjandrea Nov 30 '22 at 17:19
Minor thing, but avoid using echo on arbitrary text; use printf '%s' instead. If for example, TEXT='-e', you won't get anything printed since -e is a flag to echo and there's no way to escape it properly. – wjandrea Nov 30 '22 at 17:20

How to make xdotool type Unicode characters

2 Answers2