For characters in the Japanese kana range, it seems we must type ctrl + alpha
to get a kana to input. However, ctrl is also used to activate some Pico-8 things like "save" and such.

With poke(0x5f30,1)
we can suppress "ENTER" from bringing up the Pico-8 menu in-game.
Is there a poke I'm failing to see that will suppress Pico-8 from having its "save" function activated every time the user enters ctrl + s to type キ　(for example)?

(on another note, backtik-surrounded text to format "code snippet within a line" doesn't seem to work right?)

I thought the way was: Ctrl-K to activate kana input mode, then type one or two-letter combos to get the thing you want.

The manual doesn’t say much:

CTRL-J Hiragana   // type romanji equivalents (ka, ki, ku..)
CTRL-K Katakana   // + shift-0..9 for extra symbols

I don’t know about Ctrl-letter, maybe that’s handled by your OS and not pico8?

Those commands work when you're inside the editor.
However, when in-game or at the command line they don't (seem to) function that way (puny font is the same).

Testing this morning on macOS, using the macOS system-level Japanese input results in nothing being registered when typing characters in a quickie test. (the test just draws the pressed character on screen).

Ah, lack of puny is a known bug or limitation of the console.

I don’t know if puny/kata were intended to be supported in-game with devkit keyboard.

0.2.2b adds puny mode in the console!

@merwok Yes, thank you, I saw that in the release notes. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet; I'll be doing that after work today. Cheers.