A simple life hack for entering the symbol “#” in the Russian keyboard layout under Linux

Obsidian for taking notes. And the Markdown format has become, in fact, the main way to format typed text.

The only, but very big fly in the ointment, was the problem of entering the hash symbol “#» when using the Russian keyboard. And since pound sign (octothorp, hash, number sign, sharp, sharp), there is no keyboard layout in the Russian layout, then every time I switch to the English layout, I was a little tired. And “a little tiring” is putting it mildly, since the pound sign, in addition to indicating headings in Markdown and tags in Obsidian, is also often used as the beginning of a comment until the end of a line (in Bash, Python, NewLang).

And since the methods offered on the Internet for entering the pound symbol in the Russian keyboard layout did not inspire me at all (and if Alt + 35 on Numpad under Windows still works, but this method does not work under Linux, and occupying the clipboard for the sake of inserting one character, in general not an option), then I had to spend some time experimenting, the results of which I want to share.

Keyboard tuning options for Linux great multitude, but this does not help, but rather scares away. Therefore, I immediately abandoned editing and any “fine tuning” of the configuration files or writing my own key combinations so that it would be possible to set up convenient behavior as simply as possible without headaches and searching for edits made long ago in the configuration files.

And according to the results of testing several methods, I settled on changing the keyboard layout when pressing one key, choosing the right one as such alt. (A single Alt key for holding is more convenient than a keyboard shortcut. The Shift key is needed to change the case of characters, and Ctrl is often used to move the cursor through words and paragraphs.)

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This setting is done by setting a single checkbox in gnome-tweaks and sieve immediately all the problems with entering the hash symbol in the Russian keyboard layout (right Alt + Shift + 3).

The most surprising thing is that this input method turned out to be convenient and not only for characters that are not in the Russian layout (different options for brackets []{}<>, and “:” With “;” can be typed with one hand), but also for entering individual words in a layout different from the one used. And this, as it turned out, happens quite often. Especially when you are typing an article and you need to enter the English name of the application or an English abbreviation along the way. Just earlier I did not pay attention to such trifles and the need to switch the keyboard layout to another language was taken for granted.

And now, when typing, I often notice a sense of pleasure in using simpler actions that used to require more fuss or using two hands at the same time. Because of this, I decided to share this simple trick. Maybe this simple solution will make life easier for someone else and bring a little pleasure :-).

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