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

To find out how to enter a single character that you already see somewhere on the screen, you can copy-paste that character to some emacs buffer/file, and then call M-x describe-char. With α, it yields

[...] to input: type "C-x 8 RET 3b1" or "C-x 8 RET GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA" [...]

PS: re your profile, try also ['a'] * 28

Answer 2

C-x 8 RET, as described by @Daimrod above, is fine for a one-off insertion.

If you want to bind a key to insert a given Unicode character: Load library ucs-cmds.el, then use C-1 C-x 8 RET. That inserts the character you choose and also creates a command with the same name, which you can bind to a key.

For example, C-1 C-x 8 RET GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMBDA RET defines command greek-small-letter-lambda, which inserts that character when called.

You can create multiple such commands at once, using macro ucsc-make-commands, also from ucs-cmds.el. For example, to create individual commands for each of the Greek letters, just do this:

  (ucsc-make-commands "^greek [a-z]+ letter")

Then you can bind, say, command greek-small-letter-beta to C-c b or whatever:

  (global-set-key (kbd "C-c b") 'greek-small-letter-beta)

Answer 3

You can set your input method to Greek:

M-x set-input-method RET greek

or

C-x RET C-\ greek

(which is the same). To set the input method back press C-\ (toggle-input-method).

Answer 4

You can use ucs-insert bound to C-x8RET to insert any Unicode characters by name or by value.

For example to insert a lambda you can do

• C-x8RET GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMBDA RET → λ
• C-x8RET 03bb RET → λ

A tab-completion is also available.

C-x8RET* lambdaTAB will list every unicode characters ended by a lambda.