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When I press Ctrl+Shift+u and type numbers, nothing happens. Holding down Control or Shift doesn't help, either.

I've tried running sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration, but that didn't solve the problem.

Pablo Bianchi
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EMBLEM
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    It seems things have changed since this question was answered. I've tried all these answers in 22.10 Kinetic and none of them work. – Jason Mar 07 '23 at 22:07

2 Answers2

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It hasn't stopped working in general, but the way it works may have led you to think that it has stopped working. When one types Ctrl+Shift+u an underscored letter u appears at the insertion point. This may lead a person (e.g., myself, at first) to think that he has entered an underscored letter u, whereas in fact the underscored letter u indicates the Unicode-entry mode has been activated. If one subsequently keys in a Unicode code point (i.e., the hexadecimal numeral for the character) and hits Enter then the unicode character will appear.

For example, Ctrl+Shift+u 2764Enter inserts a "heavy black heart" Unicode character.

Demonstration: ❤

jdthood
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5

The reason why entering Ctrl+Shift+u, Unicode hexadecimal number, Enter or Space stop working in Ubuntu 15.10+ is because input method is by default XIM instead of iBus (which is odd since XIM is obsolete and iBus already implement XIM protocol). By changing this they broke this useful shortcut.

To fix it, go to:

  1. On GNOME Shell (17.10+, check with wmctrl -m):
    Settings → Region & Language → Manage Installed Languages → Language tab.

    On Unity: System Settings... → Language Support.

  2. Keyboard input method system, change it to iBus. screenshot

  3. Restart

Reference

Pablo Bianchi
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  • It hasn't stopped working. Please check the solution from jdthood – somethis Sep 03 '19 at 09:45
  • @somethis, it _has_ stopped working for many of us. The solution from jdthood isn't a solution: It's the way it was supposed to work, and I believe the OP knew this already with his question (he said "stopped working"). I can't get it to work in comments here, gmail, other edit fields, any editor, basically everywhere it used to work in 18.{mumble}. – alife Nov 13 '21 at 14:12
  • I switched to XIM as the language input method and rebooted. No change. ctrl+shift+U still does nothing. – Jason Mar 07 '23 at 18:50
  • @Jason Step 2 says _change it to iBus._ – Pablo Bianchi Mar 07 '23 at 20:06
  • I've switched it to iBus but it does nothing. Shift+ctrl+u does nothing. – Jason Apr 01 '23 at 02:20