As my keyboard doesn't support french accents, I have come to explore various techniques to support typing complex characters on keyboards without dedicated keys. I settled on using digraphs for my own purpose (see the accentC repository), and was digging around wikipedia to see what other uses this technique had.

Much to my surprise, I learnt through the "Digraphs and trigraphs" wikipedia page that old C preprocessors supported trigraphs for ASCII characters which didn't exist on older keyboards: #, \, ^, [, ], |, {, }, ~.

So I tried it out on my machine with GCC (11.2.1) and clang (12.0.1), and it turns out they are supported, although not allowed by default. On both compilers I had to use a -trigraph flag to enable them (see the Makefile).

Either way, I am committing the code to ensure I don't forget about this ancient and cursed knowledge... It could come in hand someday 😉