How To Use Hidden Characters On Your Mac Keyboard

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to find and type special hidden characters on your Mac keyboard. 

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So you probably already know that you can type almost any special character or emoji by holding the Control and Command key and hitting Space and then you get this viewer here and you can browse through it and you can search for things. Also if you want to type accent marks or character modifications you can press the key on your keyboard, like the e key, and hold it and then you'll get various versions of that key. So you can type é with an accent mark for instance.

But there are some characters that some people use a lot and you may not want to bring up the emoji viewer every time you want to use them. For instance, say you want to type degrees. You can type that pretty easily and I'm going to show you how. Also you can type things like the Apple symbol. So instead of giving you a big list of key combinations to use to type all these different characters I'm going to show you how to locate these on your own.

The first step is to go to the Apple menu and select System Preferences. In System Preferences go to Keyboard. Then under the Keyboard heading select Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar. Now when I do this you're going to see an icon appear on the upper right here. I'm going to click it and I'm going to see it appear. Now sometimes it appears as a symbol like this and sometimes it'll appear as a flag. It depends if you have multiple keyboards here although sometimes it shows up as a flag anyway. It will show up as the flag of the current keyboard that you're using. But either way you get the same thing.

If you click it here you get this Show Keyboard Viewer option. I'm going to select that. Now I get this little keyboard here. As I type you'll actually see the keys being pressed. What's better yet is you can hold down a modifier key, like the Shift key, and the keyboard will change and show you which characters you'll get if you type a key. So, for instance, notice the 1, 2, and 3 keys. If I hold down the Shift key, and I'll do that on the real keyboard, you'll see I get exclamation point, @ symbol, and the pound sign #, on my keyboard. If you're using a different keyboard, say a UK keyboard or a Spanish keyboard, then you'll see different things here. I can also click and hold the Shift key here on the screen. As a matter of fact you can even type here.

Now where it gets interesting is when you go to the Option key which is right here. I'm going to hold it down on my actual physical keyboard and I'll see how these characters change. Now you're going to see a whole bunch of special characters appear. For instance, I can see the pi symbol here. If I release the Option key I can see that's the p key. Hold it down I see it's pi. So now if I want to type the pi symbol I know I can do that with Option p and I get pi. So you can hold the Option key down and look through these characters to see if there's something you use all the time.

For instance if you use the copyright symbol a lot it might be useful to know that Option g is the copyright symbol. Option r is registered trademark. There are a lot of math symbols here as well. Not only can you see these here but also if you hold the Option and the Shift key down you'll see different characters including the Apple symbol. Shift Option K is the Apple symbol. Shift Option 8 is the degree symbol. If you hold down the Option key you'll see zero change to something that looks like the degree symbol but I think that's mostly to be used when you want to represent a dollar amount but you want the zeros to be raised like 8 dollars, eight zero zero.

Also notice that some of these keys are orange. This means you can use that key and then type a letter. So, for instance, here's an accent mark. It's Option e. If I type Option e you can see the accent mark appears but it's got this highlighted background. Now if I type a letter like e you can see it puts the e underneath the accent mark. I can do the same thing, Option e, and then type i and you can see it puts the accent mark above the i.

So these are alternative ways to type accent marks. I think today it's easier to simply hold down the key and select what you want. But this method actually predates that one so people may be used to using those.

Now just because you can type these characters doesn't mean the fonts you're using actually has them represented in the font set. So, for instance, special fonts may not have the Apple symbol, may not have the math symbols, may be missing a lot of these things and just stick to the standard letters. But in most cases you can mix and match fonts. So if you need to put the Apple symbol in and the font you're using doesn't have it you can switch to a standard font, like Helvetica, just for that one character to get the Apple symbol there.