I’m glad you found a solution. I figured it must be possible, but I had not run into that issue. Your solution will be available to everyone. Thanks for posting it!

Best,

Ryan

Hi again Ryan.

I looked up your advice and yes, switching the keyboard layout allowed me to write the special characters I needed. In that case, the new layout Latin1 did a great job. But since there is no option to start the keyboard with the Latin1 layout, and xvkbd does not remember the layout selected once you close it, I couldn’t use those special characters for the -text option

Since I looked up all over the web for about 2 days for a way to write latin characters with xvkbd -text command, and found nothing, I feel I need to share my solution: While looking into the file /etc/X11/app-defaults/XVkbd-common I found the labels for all the keys in the keyboard, and with that label, I was able to simulate a key stroke of any of the “dead keys” of the default keyboard, using the keysym operator ( \[key_label] ), so I came up with this:

In order to write this spanish sentence:
Mañana intentaré ir tras ese pingüino

The line you should include in the xbindkeys is:
xvkbd -xsendevent -text ‘\D3Ma\D1\[dead_tilde]nana intentar\D1\[dead_acute]e ir tras ese ping\D1\[dead_diaeresis]uino’

I also included \D3 and \D1, which are “delays”, at the beginning (300ms) and before every dead key stroke (100ms), because without them, the special characters (ñ, é, ü) appear at the beginning of the sentence. This might be a local performance issue, but oh well….

I have no clue how to make this work with other special characters, like portugese, greek or german, I leave that for others to look for.

Thanks again for your help Ryan, I appreciate

Bye

I haven’t run into that problem, but I’m guessing xvkbd can handle characters from other languages. I looked on the main information page for xvkbd (see here: . It does support alternate keyboards. If you type “xvkbd” into a terminal, it will pop up the virtual keyboard that is used to enter the text. In the bottom left corner there is an “xvkbd” button. If you select it, you’ll see an option to “change keyboard layout”. You can select “Spanish.” That may help.

Alternatively, there is now something similar to clippings for Chrome, though it doesn’t have keyboard shortcuts. It’s called “Papercuts”:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kjodbaafiacnpklaepiaplhbbiomipmc

I use it for some of the more complicated things I paste regularly.

I hope this helps.

thanks again!!

bye