How to Enter Unicode Characters

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It has been a while since I needed to enter a Unicode character into a text document, so when I recently had to use the Greek alpha character in an article I was working on, I paused for a minute to recall how this is done. In case you find yourself in a similar situation, here is a refresher. Press and hold the Left Ctrl and Shift keys and hit the U key. You should see the underscored u under the cursor. Type then the Unicode code of the desired character and press Enter. Voila!

The trick is, of course, to know the exact Unicode code for the character you want to insert. If you are using KDE as your preferred desktop environment, you can use KCharSelect to quickly look up the codes of Unicode characters. The utility is available in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions, so it can be installed via the default package manager.