This is what I used once when my keyboard broke and some keys stopped working. Even ordering the new keyboard was difficult when I couldn’t type my delivery address properly.
That’s where the on screen keyboard app can be handy as well. It’s on most computers.
Back in my day we didn’t have no fancy on screen keyboard built into windows! We copy and pasted from a random readme.txt file when our keyboards broke! (Or were taken away by our parents thinking it would make the computer inoperable, haha)
It is a really nice feature now though.
H
see? IT FUCKING WORKS!!!
Can I borrow this?
Just do it.
I’m still trying to find out how people make that flipped d. /s
On Windows, win+r ‘charmap’ <enter> in case anyone ever needs it. On other OS/Window managers, I’m not sure off-hand about the shortcuts.
I actually do this for complicated letter that I don’t know.
Like: ë, ñ, ũ, ü, etc
If you got compose key (linux, mac, windows with third party software), then those are trivial:
ë ñ ũ ü, and even åâăāãȧaąàáæª₂2²
Goes like
Compose e ",Compose n ~, etcBut a thing to note that resulting letters are generic and not region-specific,
like that
ë (U+00EB LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS)is not the same as
ё (U+0451 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER IO)Which might trigger spellcheckers or not even be displayed in certain fonts
There’s also apparently some weird combos like
Compose+:)for☺andCompose+CCCPfor☭, but no easily available keys for greek letters unless you tweak configs…Thanks for the advice, but it’s not important enough for me to do it.
I barely use any of these letters anyway.
On Android ü just hard press the letter and they all pop up. ñot hárd
Yeah, I know. I was mostly talking on a computer.
Ctrl-period or Ctrl-comma. Granted, you have to search with your eyes for the correct one, but they are in alphabetical order.
Send yourself an email from your phone.
Yeah, not really lol
Draw it on a piece of paper and mail it to your computer.
Use compose keys! KDE already has it installed and on Windows you can use WinCompose.
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)
I used to google for it, but now I ask chatgpt. Thats probably way worse resource-wise, right?
this is causing me physical pain
It’s even worse on mobile. I have no idea how to do this without changing my phone’s whole locale.
I actually find it a lot easier on mobile, because you can see all the symbols available to type without having to memorise them or have 2-4 different characters printed on each key. Gboard has almost every special character I ever need to use accessible in its two extra screens, and accented letters like êëéèē accessible by long-pressing the base letter.
Unexpected Keyboard (on F-Droid) is also fantastic for extra characters, give it a try, but I don’t use it as a daily driver because of lack of spellcheck and glide typing.
I’m not sure about your specific setup, but usually on mobiles you can hold your finger on a letter to see variants/accent marks.
It depends on the keyboard. I’ve used some in the past that tied that feature to the current language
Prêss æñd høld for Samsung and Google keyboards
I use SwiftKey, though.
Stop that. Data collection concerns.
Sigh, it used to be a good piece of software…before Microsoft bought it. I’m not a fan of gboard though. I want something that is very customizable.
I moved away from Swiftkey for the same reason and currently I’m pretty happy with what Heliboard has to offer. You can download it from F-Droid.
Samsung Keyboard literally lets you design your own keyboard layout in a surprisingly robust and rich way. I don’t know if it’s available on non-Samsung phones though, and I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it because it has a bunch of flaws and quirks. For example, every once in a while it seems to do select all + copy + paste, without you going anything besides typing normally. This can scroll the text to an inconvenient place, and remove special formatting. On YouTube if you’re replying to a comment it destroys the username you’re replying to, replacing the special highlight with just their name in plain text.
That application was made before the turn of the fucking millennium and it has a bad UI design?
I know, right?
For real though, Linux Mint comes with what seems to be a clone of it, name included, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other clones of it integrated into writing software. There have been plenty of opportunities to improve on the formula, and the experience is improved slightly, it’s just not enough.
Edit: turns out the one in Mint is GNOME Character Map.
Y’all motherfuckers need the compose key.
I admit I’ve never used it, but it seems to require you to know in advance the key presses to get the character you want, so it’s not going to help if it’s a character you only use rarely.
Æ
Compose-Shift-a-e
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.
Dammnnn I use right click page without formatting so much, I hate it when software removes the option from the right click menu… looking at you Teams. This will change my life!
if you want that capital ‘H’ without issues
Does this work on people?
sounds a bit complex.
i prefer to paste into notepad, and then copy it from there
Missing some vital first steps :
Screenshot the webpage. Print it out. Scan the text using OCR. Cut single character.
You can copy the H and paste it into the address bar and copy again to clear the formatting.
First you copy, then open word pad and paste it there. Then remember that word pad has text formatting and open excel and paste it there. Then remember excel also has text formatting and open calculator and paste it there. Then remember that calculator can only handle numbers (or a few letters if you are a hacker and put it in hex mode) and open Minesweeper and try to set a new personal best time. Don’t you just hate it when you have one mine left and two squares with equal chance of being the mine?
Eventually remember the pasting thing, act impressed the computer still remembers what you were trying to paste and just paste it into your notepad document and hope no one notices it’s different.
MS getting rid of word pad really messes up my usual work flow. Or would if I wasn’t switching to Linux instead of W11. I hear the word pads grow on trees there and that it comes with sudoku built right in, but they are fancy and drop the “ku” to save typing time.
sudo -ku if you feel like getting crazy
Well notepad still exists. Even though that’s not my normal text editor (I use Visual Studio Code) I use notepad for simple text manipulation frequently.
Yeah the joke was none of the first paragraph was helpful or necessary and wordpad doesn’t need to be a part of the flow. And that notepad only handles text, so you don’t have to worry about the formatting being pasted anyways.
Notepad is my goto for files that I’m not sure what type they are and I want to check if it’s text-based.
It works in m$ office apps, but not across Windows; if I open gmail and paste formatted text from the clipboard it still retains the formatting rather then pasting as plain text. I just use notepad++ or notepad anyway. Who has time for M$ word/excel bloatware?
Another cool tip is Windows + V to bring up clipboard history (past 25 copy selected text or images to your clipboard). Also the Window + Shift + S for built in screenshot tool.
I just paste it in notepad to remove formatting.
And I’m not even joking, sometimes the special ALT 0227 doesnt work and my å is only on Wikipedia…
You joke but Google is the easiest way to get the Euro symbol on a UK keyboard.
Right Alt + e?
Isn’t that just AltGr+4? A lot of UK keyboards write € on the 4 keycap next to the $.
None of the ones I’ve used tbh. That might just be luck though.
Just looking at a random selection of two laptops and five keyboards here and they all have the 4 $ € key marked. The only keyboard I can find that doesn’t is the Windows On-Screen Keyboard.
Although looking at laptops on shop websites, a lot of them have just 4 $ so maybe that is going out of fashion? Samsung yes, Asus no, Dell no, HP no.
Actually the Windows On-Screen Keyboard does show € but only after you press Alt-Gr…
You sure you’re not thinking of the Pound symbol (£)? The Euro symbol (€) would have to be a third thing, if it’s there at all.
I’m not British and don’t know their keyboard layout, so maybe you’re right, but I would expect £ to be accessible and € less so.
Edit: oh, you were right. £ is Shift+3, € is AltGr+4.
You guys are taking this Brexit thing really seriously.
I just wanna know when their referendum to join the US is gonna happen
It’s not as fun if we don’t steal it from them…
Kicking the ass of the British is just repetitive and boring at this point. We’ve already done that twice. We’ve only defeated the French once, and I’m sure they’ll put up more of a fight, when we tell them they have to speak American.
/s
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.
I do that too sometimes.
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!!!
Mod: We need you to press the caps lock key again.
User1: OKAY I DID! JUST TO BE SURE, I PRESSED IT TWICE.
Heh, I remember reading that one on the irc quote database.
when I was younger, instead of just using shift, i used to press the caps lock key and then turn it off lol
Didn’t we all. Tiny me’s fingers were not long enough to hold shift and click another key at the same item.
I have it on good authority that Sean Wrona, possibly the fastest typist in the world, does this too. When you really think about it, there’s nothing wrong with doing it that way, but I agree that it feels wrong and weird.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=m9EXEpjSDEw this is what his typing looks like in action (though no clear shot of him using shift or caps lock as far as I can see)
https://data.typeracer.com/pit/profile?user=arenasnow his profile on a competitive typing website.
Edit: found a quote from his website:
I recommend using caps lock instead of shift to type capital letters to allow more flexibility in the hand that you would normally use shift with.
My wife does this and it drives me crazy!
Psst, check out my reply to the parent comment :) your wife might be right, though I’m firmly on your side
This was how many errors never made it to a newspaper page. Writer fucked up? You go in the trash and you find an H and you stick it over top. Or you ransom-note a whole word that way.
Ain’t nobody got time for printers. There was partying to be done and deadlines.
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.
Use compose key. Or is that not available on Windows?
You mean \lambda, \Delta and \Phi?
Not all of us are able to use superior tools like LaTeX for our documents, unfortunately
If you are using office, insert formula accepts latex code.
Good to know. Been learning some LaTeX from a friend recently, so I’ll have to try this out.
You mean LATEX?
(Btw for the uninitiated: The x is a chi, pronounced as in Koine/Modern Greek, like in British “hue”, first make sure it’s a “hj” and then squeeze it even tighter. At least according to Knuth it’s a chi, that is.)
Stop! Sync for Lemmy and/or markdown can only go so far…
Today I learned that Markdown in Eternity can handle
ALPHABETSOU^P
Just take a picture of the Wikipedia page and use OCR. No need for that copy and pasting nonsense.
Email the page pdf to your nan so that she can print it out first.
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
There are honestly some people I work with who are like this. It’s just as nightmarish as it sounds
I used to do this, but then I changed to Hat. It’s increased my productivity significantly and saves me multiple hours each week.
Bro I can do you one better than that and it even works without internet after the first time if you work from home!
Open a file and copy the capitals (Ass for A, Bumbulum for B, etc.) from Wikipedia and boom! You add some html around it, go to godaddy or your favorite registrar and claim a domain (I like the expensive ones), manage nameserver and dynamic DNS with cloud flare so can access your home router without getting a static IP from your ISP, then use nginx to set up a reverse proxy (don’t forget to forward unique ports on your router in the NAT rules section!), spool a virtual machine and use your router to create a static lease, stick that file on that machine, and then make yourself a browser bookmark to the URL you purchased that hits your router port forwards to reverse proxy and lands you in that VM on a shared drive! The best part is you can often do this for less than $1000 per month depending on the URL you pick.
Oh, be sure to set up some 2FA though if you don’t want to get hacked.
I’m not a computer wiz, this is all way over my head.
Bro it’s super easy, just RTFM!
(I use arch BTW)
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.
I go to Infrastructure. I hope to find a shorter word in the future but so far I’ve got nothing.
