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ilo nena is a purpose-built hardware keyboard that can type sitelen pona Unicode into computers. It supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS, configurable on the setting page of the ilo nena unit itself.
This technical article explains how ilo nena types Unicode into computers. I'm using U+F1900 as an example in this blogpost:
On Windows, ilo nena uses the third party software WinCompose to type Unicode into computers. It enters the Unicode by typing the following key sequence:
Technically speaking Windows supports typing Unicode with Alt code out of the box. However, I empirically found that it doesn't work on most of the programs and it doesn't work beyond U+FFFF. Therefore, I ended up resort using a third party software for Windows
On Linux, ilo nena uses the CTRL+SHIFT+U sequence. It's supported out of the box on most Linux installations:
The correct way to type the numbers above is to use the numbers on Num Pad with Numlock enabled. Otherwise, it won't work in certain keyboard layouts with ibus.
Mac OS has an "Unicode Hex Input" input method. To type in Unicode, the user has to select the input method. ilo nena would enter the following sequence to type out the Unicode glyph:
DB86DB00 is the UTF-16 encoding of F1900.
ilo nena also supports Latin Mode, which would output the romanized pronunciation of the character. For example, U+F1900 would become "a", U+F1901 would become "akesi" and so on. This mode would not output the Unicode glyph. However, it works on all operating systems out of the box. This is actually the default mode of ilo nena.
If multiple keyboards are attached to a single computer, all of the keyboards would share the same Numlock and Capslock state. In case ilo nena detected the Capslock is active at the time that it wants to type out the key sequence, it'd toggle the Capslock to disable it before sending out the sequence, and toggle Capslock again to re-enable after it finishes.
On Linux, the Numlock is also toggled if it's disabled so that the Numlock would be enabled.
Let's hope that this article would be helpful for those who want to make a Unicode-typing keyboard. I'll be making more technical blogposts about the ilo nena project. Stay tuned!
Copyright (C) 2025 Wong Cho Ching, all rights reserved.