bug#20499: [PROPOSED PATCH] C-x 8 shorthands for curved quotes, , Euro, etc.

[Stefan Monnier]

> IOW, the above selection is highly filtered using some unspecified
> rules, and therefore it at best emulates a use case where the user has
> a pretty good knowledge about what she wants to find.  And still, you
> need to select out of about 300 characters.

> How's that workable, except in very simple use cases?

It's workable in the following way:
- first time around, you'll have to scan all those chars, which will
  take a little while.
- second time around you'll also have to scan them, but it will take
  a bit less time.
- ...
- Nth time around, you'll either know more or less where the char is so
  you don't need to scan all those chars any more, or you'll have
  learned some other way to insert the char.

That's what I do every once in a while using the symbols.dvi document,
looking for how to enter some funny-looking math symbols in LaTeX.
I generally have no clue whatsoever how the symbol might be called when
I do such searches.

And I agree that further refinement (such as restricting the display to
those glyphs that have an "e" in them, which would include all the
weirdly accented forms of "e" and probably the upper case forms as
well) would be a nice addition.
  
E.g. it would be great to be able to say "it's char that has a > in its
glyph" and then be presented with things like ≥, right angle brackets,
right arrows, ...


        Stefan