Thanks, Piotr. These are derived from the Early Buddhist Manuscript Project site here.
If someone with a Mac can test this method and let us know whether it still works that would be great.
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There is now an easy way to enter pali characters! So you can enter words like Satipaṭṭhāna, or Ānanda, in all their diacritically correct glory. I think it should be obvious how it works! But if not, it’s just another button on the tool bar, next to the bold, italic and smilies and stuff.
Strictly mouse based. Anyone who wants a keyboard option should use one of the existing setups in this thread, as applicable to their OS.
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Acchariyaṁ āvuso! Abbhutaṁ āvuso! Seyyathāpi āvuso nikkujjitaṁ vā ukkuyyeya, paṭicchannaṁ vā vivareyya, muḷhassa vā maggaṁ ācikkheyya…
Not to be picky, but I’m wondering whether we couldn’t get the Sanskrit ś ṣ ṛ ḥ …
Dear Blake, dear Bhante,
thanks so much! This is just āwesoṁe! 
…I mean to say that this is a very easy and convenient solution for occasional Pāli users… (where “easy” means easy to use… thanks a ton for the programming effort!)
With much mettā,
Robert
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Sadhu! Sadhu! Sadhu!
Kataññu-katavedi
Sabbe sattā bhavantu sukhitattā
russ
Well, since you were wondering… ṛṝḹḥśṣ
I decided to put the sanskrit chars after the pali ones, instead of putting everything in sanskrit alphabetical order.
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Dear Piotr, dear all,
@Linda asked me to share her instructions for a Pali keyboard layout on MAC, because she had some problems uploading the attachments.
The instructions seem similar as those on the web-site @Piotr had provided a link to, but they are a bit better readable. I am not sure in how far both packages are related. Linda uses her layout package on a relatively old machine. She had received those files (see zip-archive) and instructions from Ven Punnadhammo:
Pali_MAC.zip (16.8 KB)
Put the two files attached to this email (pali.icns and pali.keylayout) into Library > Keyboard Layouts
Open up “System Preferences” go into “International” and then from there into “Input Menu” and make sure the option box at the bottom “Show > input menu in menu bar” is ticked.
You should now have a flag visible near the top right of the menu bar. Scroll down and you will see an option for Pali. (you may have to restart your system to get this)
If you select the Pali Keymap option from the flag menu, you have access to pali letters on the option key. Example - option “a” is now ā etc. Some of the variations of “n” are located on option-period and option-comma but the rest should be obvious. [This seems similar as the keyboard layout you find as a graphic scheme in pdf-format under the link Piotr had provided.]
When you are not using the Pali letters it is better to go back to your standard layout (the original flag) because the switched options will confuse some applications.
Thanks @Linda and much mettā to all,
Robert
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Thanks so much, we know have instructions for all three main operating systems.
As a long term Linux and FOSS advocate, I cannot resist pointing out that Linux, as usual, wins: the only system with a standardized and inbuilt method of entering non-standard characters from the keyboard in any application. Once more, dāna beats capitalism…
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@blake, the add diacriticals button was busted some time ago, needs a-fixin’. Discourse has changed the handling of the editor buttons; previously when you narrowed the screen they would reflow, which was a problem as they obscured the first line of the editor. Now they disappear off the edge. I’m guessing this switch may have nixed our add-on.
Dhamma Greetings Robert (and everyone),
there are the described problems with that package, if one uses the “setup.exe”.
Flawless installation works, if one directly executes the msi-files.
Since fsnow.com is down, I put it on the drive of my OpenMailBox account:
Pali Keyboard Layout for Windows
Kind Regards
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Bhante Anandajoti just let me know of a Windows utility he has for this.
thank you, Piotr - i’ve just installed the EasyUnicode keyboard for the Mac from http://www.tipitaka.org/keyboard/ and i can say it works brilliantly - once you’ve downloaded it and dragged it into your Library folder, it works just as Bhante Sujato says the Unix one does: it’s as though inbuilt. English speakers can make it active and forget it - it’s a normal QWERTY keyboard until you press the Option key, at which point…
Buddhaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi
Dhammaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi
Sanghaṃ śaraṇaṃ gacchāmi…
mmm…or should i say “ṃṃṃ…”? 
it’s great. it took me only slightly longer to type that than it would have without diacriticals at all, and i’m sure i’ll get quicker as i get used to having it there. sādhu, sādhu, sādhu!
For those who use Linux without a desktop environment, there is also an easy solution. The following works on Debian GNU/Linux 8.
You can edit the XKB (X Keyboard) config file as the superuser:
# vi /etc/default/keyboard
The following line will map the Compose key to Caps Lock:
XKBOPTIONS="compose:caps"
Then just restart the input subsystem like so:
# udevadm trigger --subsystem-match=input --action=change
Ãftéṝ ṭḥāṭ īṭ īś péṛṁāñēṇṭḹý ċḥãṅġēḍ.
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Cool, this works on Ubuntu too.
I’m wondering whether, since these settings are part of X, they’ll be broken/changed when the distros switch to Wayland/Myr.
Here is a bit of info.
Wayland: It looks like Wayland uses a config file called weston.ini, that accepts all the usual XKBOPTIONS stuff in a setting called keymap_options. That seems very easy and convenient.
Ubuntu+Mir: I tried the new beta of 16.04 LTS in a VM, and found that the “/etc/default/keyboard” file is still present, but mapping the compose key there and resetting the input subsystem does not work. Instead, as the root user, you should run:
# dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
This will give you a choice of compose keys using a nice dialog. After that, the program will automatically update “/etc/default/keyboard” and do some other things to enable the Compose key. In any case, it seems to work. It would be nice if they updated documentation like keyboard(5) as they change these things, though.
Update: The above “dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration” also works on Debian, and is probably the more general and universal form that should be used to configure the Compose key on Debian or Ubuntu without using a desktop environment tool.
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Thanks so much, that’s great to know. We should keep an eye on this and update as these roll out.
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If you like the compose-key solution that is built in on Linux, as has been mentioned above (you just need to define which key to use as the compose key), you can install WinCompose https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose to get the same functionality on Windows. I have not tested it extensively, but it seems to work.
Nice to not have to learn different solutions, or spend time mapping keystrokes…
Hmm, after a bit of experimentation, it seems that, WinCompose doesn’t seem to completely work the same as the standard Unix/Linux bahaviour, at least on my system. Annoyingly ī doesn’t work. Neither does ō, but that’s not a problem for typing Pali…
Thanks for the solutions.
I think I’ll just stick to copy and paste from the list āīūṅñṭḍṇḷṃᾹŪṄÑḶṬ in a file opened in Notepad++.
I use the Kindle (the old model with keyboard) to access the Pali suttas (from Readingfaithfully.org) but found that I can’t search it as I don’t know how to enter diacritics on the Kindle (BTW a quick search showed some ways for the newer Kindles).
Searching on Adobe PDF is fine (but it doesn’t take into account the diacritics).
How universally acceptable are the following symbols:
aaiiuu`n~n.t.d.n.l.m
Recently I found another source for the suttas (+ vinaya) at Tipitaka.org which is more complete and am contemplating converting the diacritics in them into the symbols for .mobi (kindle version) so that they can be searched more easily. Maybe the same for a kindle Paali dictionary, eventually.
This is the velthuis system. It’s essentially useless now, it was invented for a time before Unicode. It was intended as a simple way of writing the diacritical characters, which would then be converted to the proper forms for printing. It’s not meant for actual display of texts.
They have the same suttas—Pali ones at least—as SC, but no translations. What they have extra is later texts, so they’re useful for checking commentaries.
You’re thinking of downgrading masses of texts which are already correctly coded into something else: maybe the universe is telling you something! 
A kindle is fine for just reading straight text, but not for searching for Pali passages. There are better tools.
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