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I found out by accident that, on a British Mac, a hashtag can be written by pressing Option + 3. This does not appear on any of the usual lists of shortcuts. There must be many similar shortcuts for symbols and special characters. Does anyone know where I can find a comprehensive list?
Welcome!
Because there are so many localized keyboards, finding convenient shortcut information can be hard. However, the solution is already built into your Mac OS. From System Preferences, open Keyboard prefs and select the "Input Sources" tab. At the bottom of that section, select the check box:
That puts this icon in your menubar:
When you click the icon, one of the options is "Show Keyboard Viewer." Select that and you get an onscreen, interactive representation of your localized keyboard:
Holding the modifier keys (shift; option, shift + Option; etc) on your physical keyboard will show the changes those modifiers create in the virtual representation. You can always access this function from within a program so you don't have to leave you current page to look up special characters a web page.
Welcome!
Because there are so many localized keyboards, finding convenient shortcut information can be hard. However, the solution is already built into your Mac OS. From System Preferences, open Keyboard prefs and select the "Input Sources" tab. At the bottom of that section, select the check box:
That puts this icon in your menubar:
When you click the icon, one of the options is "Show Keyboard Viewer." Select that and you get an onscreen, interactive representation of your localized keyboard:
Holding the modifier keys (shift; option, shift + Option; etc) on your physical keyboard will show the changes those modifiers create in the virtual representation. You can always access this function from within a program so you don't have to leave you current page to look up special characters a web page.
Go to the System/Keyboard/Keyboard preference pane and check this check box:
Go to the menu bar and select Show Keyboard Viewer:
Then you'll get this and can experiment to see what key combinations produce what symbols:
pauldsh wrote:
There must be many similar shortcuts for symbols and special characters. Does anyone know where I can find a comprehensive list?
As Allan Jones said, Keyboard Viewer is the best way to explore the option shortcuts. For specific info on how to make accented characters and certain other symbols with the US, British, and ABC Extended layouts,, a useful list is at
https://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/mac/codemac/
Thank you Allan for your incredibly clear description of how to bring up the virtual keyboard. It’s now up and running.
Thank you, too, to Tom for that link and to Old Toad for your contribution.
There is much here, as I suspected, that is useful to me. I need to write in European languages and so the German double S and the Spanish upside down question mark in particular I have been looking for.
Nice find, Tom.
Shortcuts for symbols and special characters (eg hashtag)
