How to enter Greek characters in Emacs

Question

This page indicates that Greek letters can be inserted into Emacs by using M-i. However, Emacs 23.2.1 in a Debian Squeeze variant inserts the \"tab\" character when

Answer 1

The easiest way to sporadically insert Greek characters in Emacs is to use abbrev-mode with this abbrev table of Greek letters.

To use the above gist, start emacs and invoke M-x edit-abbrevs which will start the Abbrevs editor. Then cut and paste the definitions within it under the (global-abbrev-table) section (to make them globally available) or place them underneath another heading e.g. (text-mode-abbrev-table).

Ensure to enable abbrev-mode in a given buffer with M-x abbrev-mode RET, or enable abbrev-mode globally by adding (setq-default abbrev-mode t) to your init file. Alternatively if you want to enable abbrev-mode only for e.g. text and derived modes, use (add-hook 'text-mode-hook (lambda () (abbrev-mode 1))).

See the emacs wiki about abbrev-mode for more.