10 Ways To Type Special Characters On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at all the different ways you can type Symbols & Special Characters on your Mac. 

For typing letters, numbers, and punctuation marks on your Mac it's pretty straight forward. You can see those characters right on your Mac's keyboard. But if you want to go beyond that you need to use one of a variety of special techniques. The simplest one is mostly used for letters that have accent marks or are variations on the letter. To type these, instead of just pressing the letter you want to press and hold the letter. So here in TextEdit if I want to type the letter a I just press the letter a on my keyboard. If I want the letter a with an accent mark instead of just pressing it and quickly releasing the key I press and hold. Then I get this special menu that appears above the letter. This will only appear if there is an accent mark or letter variation present. It's not going to work for all letters and it's going to depend on your keyboard settings and your language settings as to whether or not there is something available. 

I can select which  one I want by using the mouse or trackpad to click there, but if you're typing you probably want to keep your hands on the keyboard. In that case you can just choose by number. So I"m going to press the number 2 on my keyboard and it chooses that letter. If I press and hold e you can see the variations I get here and I can choose 1. Again, it depends on the language. So c, for instance, gives me a few options here to use in English but the letter j gives me nothing. The letter h presents just one option there that I can choose. If I don't want to choose one of these, maybe I accidentally held the key down too long, I can just go to the next letter, like that, and it will ignore it. 

Another thing you can do is hold down a Modifier Key. The key ones here being Shift and Option. So hold down the Option Key and press a key on the keyboard. For instance the letter p gives me the symbol for Pi if the Option Key is being held down when I press p. A lot of times these kind of make sense. For instance p for Pi. Also for, say, the number 8 you get an asterisk if you use Shift 8 and if you hold Option 8 you get a bullet. Sometimes you can use both Option and Shift together, hold both of those down, and then you get a separate character, for instance Option Shift 8 gives me a degree symbol. 

Now there are many ways to figure out what you get when you hold the Option Key and press a key. One is you can just try some. Another is you can lookup online where people provide lists of these. You can also look on your Mac. If you go into System Settings and then you go to Keyboard here, on the left, and you choose Input Sources. Then you select your keyboard here. On the left you'll see a little mini representation of the keyboard. Hold the Option Key down and it shows you what you get if you press Option for all these keys. Continue to Hold Option and also add Shift and you see those as well. So, you can kind of study your keyboard to figure out what's available. 

Another place you can see this is if you go to Accessibility. Then you go down under Motor to Keyboard and turn On the Accessibility Keyboard. This gives you a little floating palette here that will stay with you so you can actually see it while you're typing. There are a ton of different options here. For instance you can make it semi-transparent if you like. Make it different sizes. Here you can see what happens when you hold down Option and you get the different symbols that would be typed holding down Option. Hold down Option Shift and you see those. So something you can keep on the screen and not have to have System Settings always open. 

But Accessibility Keyboard has another advantage over the one in System Settings. That is you can actually use it to type. So, for instance, if I want to type the degree symbol here I can actually click the Option Key, and it acts like the Option Key is being held down, and then I can click the Shift Key and I can find the symbol I want. Click it and it actually types it for me and then releases the modifier keys. So you can use this as a visual way to do the same thing you do with the Option and Shift Key. You can even click and hold the letter that has accent marks or variations and it acts just like you pressed it on the keyboard. You can now click on the one you want here so you could type these without actually using the keyboard. You can type regular letters as well. 

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Now while have the Accessibility Keyboard up we can see that if you hold the Option Key down some of the keys have an orangish outline. These are special keys that represent little accent marks. This is another way to type Accent Marks. So, for instance, take this one right here. This is the e key. If I were to click that you see it types the accent mark but then it has this little highlight behind it. If now I type e you can see I get e with the accent mark. Or a, I get the a with the accent mark. It shows you other keys here where the letter is going to be different because I use that Option e first. So I can type u here and get u with the accent mark. Now you can do this completely without the Accessibility Keyboard. If you also have to type letters with an accent mark you a type Option e and then the letter, a. Option e and then the letter, and in this case we'll just do another e there to get the e with an accent mark. 

Now the way to type even more characters is to use the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. You can do that by using one or two keyboard shortcuts. One that has been around for a long time is to hold Control and Command and then press Space. This brings up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer and you've got lists here of all of the different characters starting usually with the Emoji characters. But if you continue to go down you'll characters that aren't Emojis but are Symbols.  You've got a little handy set here at the bottom where you can jump around into different sections. So you find the one you want, like this one, and you click it and it inserts it in there. So any time you need a special character you can use that. 

The second keyboard shortcut which works in newer versions of macOS is to hold the Globe key or fn key and use e, which makes sense, e for Emoji. Then you can select the character you want from there. Also, note that there is a lot of functionality here. Like the most recent ones you've used are here at the top so if you are using one over and over again you're always going to find it up here. You can also Search. So for instance if you want to find the pizza emoji you can just search for pizza. It will come right up. Sometimes the searches will give you results you want and sometimes you have to think of alternative ways to phrase what you want to find that emoji or special character. But note you do get lots of special characters here. So if you need the square root symbol, for instance, you can search for square root and it will come up and then you can type that character. 

Now another way to quickly get the character you want is to actually just type the word, like this. Then bring up the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. I'm going to use Control Command Space. But notice what it does right away. It doesn't show me all the characters. It just shows me ones that match what I just typed. Now I can just press Return and it will convert that word to the emoji character. So, for instance, I can do this and you can see I get 3. I can use the arrow keys to choose the one I want and then Return and it will replace the word with that character. However, if you want something different you would just need to use the keyboard shortcut twice. I'll do Control Command Space here and then since I don't want to use one of these 3 I will do Control Command Space a second time and it will push it into the regular Emoji & Special Character Viewer. 

Now Emoji & Special Character Viewer, that's been around for years. But there is another panel that's been around even longer than that called the Character Viewer. You can actually get to it from here. You want to look at the row at the bottom here. If you need to you want to use the little arrow there to go to the right to get to the end of these categories. You'll see this symbol here at the bottom right. Click that and it converts the panel to the Character Viewer. The Character Viewer has a lot more functionality to it. First of all it's got Categories here to the left so you can jump to a specific category. You can customize the categories that are there. You can customize how things appear. If you select a specific character, like say this here, you get to see its actual name so you know what to search for in the future. You get variations according to Fonts. You can scroll through to see what else is available and select that. If you want to use a character just double click it in here and it inserts it where you're typing. You've also got this Add to Favorites button here. Click that and you'll have a little Favorites category here with any that you've added. Anytime you use the Keyboard Shortcut it's going to go to the Character Viewer instead of the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. You need to look for that same button as before. Click that and it will toggle back to be the Emoji & Special Character Viewer. So now that is what's going to appear. The Favorites you select in the Character Viewer will now appear here underneath Recents for easy access. 

Now here's a tip for quick access to these Viewer Panels. If you go into System Setting, go to Keyboard, and back into Input Sources. This is where we were before. Instead of selecting your keyboard keep it on All Input Sources. Then you get some general settings here including Show Input Menus in Menu Bar. Then you get this little control here. Now all these symbols and emoji characters are all just regular characters and can be copied and pasted from document to document or from a webpage into your document. So sometimes it is just easier to search the web for a character. For instance, I'll just search here in Safari for hamburger emoji. Now you're going to get a pages of information about emojis, symbols and other things. But all need to do is locate one, even here at the top, you can just select this, Copy, and then switch back to your document and Paste. You are pasting that emoji character in there. As a matter of fact you may want to create your own document with special characters that you use from time to time. You can just do this in Notes, for instance. You can create a new note. Call it Characters and then just paste things in here. You can put details if you want or just have a little selections of things that you can easily Copy & Paste from this note or text document or Pages document, or whatever you want, into future documents, emails, or messages. 

Another thing you can do is you can create text replacements if you want. Go to Keyboard, Settings, and then you go to Text Replacement. For instance I've already got one here for pizza, exclamation point pizza. I would never type the word pizza with an exclamation point in front of it so it is safe to use and it just replaces that with a slice of pizza there. I can add a new one and I say Replace exclamation point burger and then paste in that hamburger character there. With those two text replacements setup in System Settings I can now easily type those characters. 

Now I want to show you one more. This one is really geeky. You can actually type a lot of special characters using their Unicode Text Code. So let's go back into System Setting here. We're going to go to Keyboard, and then right back to Input Sources and to Edit. We're going to Add a second keyboard. It's not going to be anyone of these associated with a language. We're going to go all the way to the bottom and there is Others. Select that and you'll probably just see the one. Unicode Text Input. Add that. That will automatically turn on the Show Input Menu in Menu Bar up here. We're going to switch to Unicode Text Input. When we do so you can't use the Option Key anymore to type things. For instance Option 8 doesn't get you anything. But now you can actually type the codes for any characters you want. So for instance I like to use a little triangle as a bullet character. I would hold the Option key down and type 25B6 and it types that character. Notice nothing happens until I type that 4th digit of that hexadecimal code for that character. Now this only works for 4 digit characters so 1F600 is the smiley face emoji but if you tried to type it, as soon as you type the first zero it will give you the character of 1F60 and ignore the next zero that you type. So the only way to type that character is to use an eight digit code, a UTF16 code. Now I told this was going to be geeky. So that is D83DDE00 and then it will do the character. If you like the hex codes you can, of course, find a list of them online so you can memorize a few key ones and then switch to this keyboard. Keep in mind that the rest of the letters, they work fine. So you can type mostly as normal. Just with any special characters you need to hold down the Option Key and then type the digits.

So there you go. You've got ton of different ways to type special characters beyond the standard letters, numbers, and punctuation on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.