Alternative shortcuts to copy the character

Question

To copy the character at point usually I do Shift-<right> M-w. I am wondering what are the alternative ways to do this action using only the Emacs standard keybindings (maybe with minimal keystrokes but this is not very important).

Specially when working with unicode characters, it is easier to copy-paste them rather than insert them directly, this is maybe a reason why a convenient shortcut for copying a character would be helpful.

Perhaps an inconvenience with Shift-<right> M-w is that the fours keys involving in this action are a little far away.

Of course one can define a personal shortcut for this, but I am looking for a standard shortcut.

(Note: It appears that in vim mode vy can do this).

Edit: I appears that the short answer to my question is no. For this reason I accepted the answer given by Emacs User. An alternative solution is the following: We can exploit the fact that the shortcut Meta-w bounds to nothing if a region is selected. Hence we can use the ordinary Meta-w to copy the character with the following settings The first function was suggested by lawlist. This is the best alternative way I found without introducing an extra shortcut.

(defun my-copy-region-as-kill ()
  (interactive) (copy-region-as-kill (point) (1+ (point))))

(defun my-copy-character () (interactive)
       (if (region-active-p) (kill-ring-save (region-beginning) (region-end))
     (my-copy-region-as-kill)))

(global-set-key (kbd "M-w") 'my-copy-character)

Answer 1

but I am looking for a standard shortcut

I'm afraid there's not one for such a purpose, but you can adapt standard ways. For example:

get it into kill-ring and then re-use as shown by lawlist above

I've used C-/ as my shortcut key. This is useful for only the last character. What if you frequently use a handful of unicode characters?

Then you can saves to registers beforehand for all the unicode characters you want and then restore from registers as needed. This can be very fast and convenient if you especially need to use multiple machines and don't have much time for configuration.

Answer 2

C-SPC C-f C-insert does the same thing with more keychords but less modifier shuffling.

I'm struggling to see why you're using this so much:

• For characters that you use often, set up a suitable input method.
• For characters that you use rarely, there's insert-char, bound to C-x 8 RET by default (but a good candidate for a simpler binding such as C-c c or f8 if you use it often). Inserting a recently-inserted character again is easy by navigating the history.
• For whole words, you can use M-@ M-w.
• For whole words that start with something easy to type, there's M-/ and C-M-/ (dynamic abbrevs).