If you ever actively participated in heated forum debates, probably sometimes you ended replying to many points in original post, quoting bits of text. And then you sensed despair, because it was so hard to distinguish your text from original author — it all looked the same!.
Enter the world of productive forum posting.
Unfortunately not all Mac users are aware that they possess very powerful shortcut mechanism, available in all native applications that allows to enter cool symbols with little effort — just a single keystroke!
These shortcuts could have been reproduced on other platforms, such as Microsoft Windows or Linux, but they would clash with many Alt-Whatever shortcuts that are already present in many applications. They have some sort of equivalent in face of Win-Something shortcuts (the Option “⌥” key that’s used to enter these shortcuts is located at the same place as Win key on Windows keyboards), but Win-shortcuts are commonly used for doing desktop-wide things, like controlling music player, IM application or hiding windows.
Note: In order to maximally enjoy this post, please either view it on a Mac, get this image (501KB), or use Safari Test.
UPDATE: Added information how to change keyboard layout, and how to access rarely used symbols you don’t want to memorize.
UPDATE2: Matej Cepl informed me that on X11 there’s Compose key which could help in typing diacritics and some other symbols.
1 Comment