You kid, but as an Canadian Anglophone, this is what I do any time I have to send an email to someone with a French name with an accented character.
Yes, I know the special character menu is a thing, but I have shit to do.
Try this instead if you have a number pad on your keyboard:
Hold alt and type 0233 and then release the alt key.
For my favourite, type : then hold alt and type 0254. 😛
I have not had a number pad on my keyboard for some time :( I remember this arcane magic
I believe you can do this with the on-screen keyboard! If you're using Windows, I think that can be accessed with super+u (but I haven't used Windows in a long time so I apologize if I misremembered or if this is no longer accurate).
Or better yet, start using the US-international keyboard layout. You press the accent you want (', `, ", ~, ...) and the letter you want it on, and boom. Writing normal versions of those symbols requires a space after writing them, but that's easy to get used to.
It's pretty much the default setting in the Netherlands.
I work in IT and I have coworkers that use caps lock to capitalize single letters, like the beginning of a sentence. It hurts a bit every time I see it.
I work in IT and I have coworkers that call the emergency support line on Saturday at 7 in the morning because "this bullshit system won't let me log in", then I remote in and it says in big letters right at the center of the login screen CAPSLOCK ENABLED.
I won't complain though, that way I make an extra 50€ (1h minimum billing time with weekend bonus) in under a minute.
I think this kind of thing is inevitable due to change blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness
You don't get hit with the change blindness because A: you're looking at the situation with fresh eyes instead of sleep deprived pre-coffee eyes that just want to get through the login screen to get some work done
And B, because you know how to interpret every bit of visual information on the screen and thus think of it as important. I mean, think of all the times you looked at someone else's computer and their desktop background was their kid or their dog. That's a huge change in visual terms, but it's a tiny change in terms of importance, so you dismiss it and get used to it immediately. You file it as unimportant and ignore it. Your filing of stuff is correct because you actually understand it. But an average user will file every single thing they don't understand as important, and also many things they do understand but don't care about.
Disk mount error. Resolution not recommended. Are you experiencing interruptions? Find out why! Buy boner pills now! It looks like you're trying to write a word document, would you like help? It's a sunny day, 22 degrees C. USERS APPDATA ROAMING. Janice from accounting wants to show you her baby pictures. Back up your files to OneDrive now. You're overdue for an antivirus scan. This flash drive may be corrupted, would you like to repair it? The program crashed, reporting the problem to Microsoft. Solitaire. A Nigerian prince needs your money. Please verify your phone number.
These messages all have varying levels of importance, but they all demand the user's attention in a way most people can't tell apart. The user is a bald monkey relying on stimulus-sorting firmware that's hundreds of thousands of years out of date. So the occipital lobe just files every one of those messages under the same label: noise.
Reminds me of the bash.org quote that went something like:
User1 joins channel
User1: HELLO EVERYONE!
Mod: Try hitting the caps lock key
User1: OMG THANK YOU THAT'S SO MUCH EASIER!!!
Yes, but you need to be wary of pasting the formatting.
So when you do this, instead of pasting with Control+V you will want to paste without formatting using the Control+Shift+V command.
So remember - if you want that capital 'H' without issues, use your Shift key when pasting what you copy from Wikipedia.
sounds a bit complex.
i prefer to paste into notepad, and then copy it from there
You can copy the H and paste it into the address bar and copy again to clear the formatting.
I used to do this, but then I changed to Hat. It's increased my productivity significantly and saves me multiple hours each week.
do you mind sharing your secret for the capital i? you just used three of them in one post and i have no idea how you accomplished such a feat
Use an l
It's the same thing, but you go to the Wikipedia article for Æthelred I of Wessex and copy his Roman numeral.
This but for em dashes
Many applications will automatically convert two hyphens to an em dash.
--
Alt+0150
That's actually the alt code for an en dash. Em dash is Alt+0151!
Just take a picture of the Wikipedia page and use OCR. No need for that copy and pasting nonsense.
On desktop, how many people search for an emoji, then just copy paste the character into their text?
Instead of switching to the alt keyboard, not that one, the other, no the emoji not the international one, dammit.
Or bringing up the keyboard menu, then scrolling around, looking for the right one, searching, no, scroll, scroll scroll, etc.
I'm about to blow your mind.
Windows key + . brings up an emoji menu. I only discovered this by accident about a month ago.
On my KDE desktop its a simple Win+Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Space.
Not even kidding
You just gotta slam your hand in just the right place.
I do this when writing λ, Δ, Φ, etc. in a document on a computer I don't own or when on my phone. It's genuinely faster than scrolling through Word's symbol list, for example.
You mean \lambda, \Delta and \Phi?
Not all of us are able to use superior tools like LaTeX for our documents, unfortunately
Used to work with someone who would recycle characters. Like, instead of typing a letter on the keyboard (which had many keys specifically for this purpose), they would go looking for that letter in some text they were going to discard and Ctrl-X Ctrl-V it.
I mean in this economy who can blame them
You joke but Google is the easiest way to get the Euro symbol on a UK keyboard.
What you have to do to type é on a standard keyboard is white supremacy in action
Just press shift+è, smh
This comment was brought to you by the Italian keyboard gang
Honestly shit like that works really well when half of your notebook's keyboard doesn't work anymore. The on screen keyboard is limited and copy pasting letters from texts can be faster. Especially with special characters. Or when you just need an a or s, opening the on screen keyboard again and again vs copy pasting it once and using it as a source - the second one is faster.
I am very sad and desperate I can't afford a new laptop
You could get an external keyboard to use with your laptop.
I literally have one at home and didn't think of that. Thanks.
I actually do this for complicated letter that I don't know.
Like: ë, ñ, ũ, ü, etc
There's something a bit upsetting about how finding it online is faster and easier than using an application purpose-built for this purpose (Character Map)
On Android ü just hard press the letter and they all pop up. ñot hárd
when I was younger, instead of just using shift, i used to press the caps lock key and then turn it off lol
Presumably the original post was made facetiously, but since a lot of people are talking about special characters in the comments:
I can't confirm anymore, but besides all the alt shortcuts in the comments, in Windows it used to be that you could open the Character Map from the Start menu, then either copy any character from a chart or select the character to see its alt code.
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