Hey everybody.
So I want to access characters with fn-e. I do get characters, lots of emoji and the like. But I want other characters like ae-ligature, runes, that kind of thing. Some of these can be generated with the keyboard, e.g. option-c generates ç. But I'm pretty sure you don't get keyboard shortcuts for things like runes, plus, I have no idea what all of the characters are that we have available anyway.
If I hit fn-e, it does say "character pallet, has new system dialogue". If I search for "runic", I get the first rune, but I can't get to anything else in the list, assuming it's there. If I skip search and interact with the table, I get grids I can interact with like people, objects, and so on. These give me emoji, or some letter-based symbols, e.g. copyright and trademark. How do I get to the full set of characters?
I know some other keyboard layouts let you generate some more with the option key, but I don't do that enough to want to change default layout. Plus, if I were writing German and wanted umlauts, there's probably a simple enough way to change layouts on the fly, but again, no layout is going to give me all of the characters, there's no keyboard shortcut for any of the runes or the "yin yang symbol" emoji or any number of other things.
I assume if I can get to characters other than the emoji or symbols, I'd get all of the umlauts and runes and extra letters used in Icelandic and Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on. But I have no idea how to get there, they don't show up as a set of options in the table of grids. I mean, I guess the good news is that if I want to make a game, I have access to represent all possible dominoes in both horizontal and vertical layout. But since I'm not planning on making a dominoes game at the moment, here I am.
Comments
I think you can set the…
I think you can set the globe key to show the emoji picker which might show special characters… I haven’t used this in four years and four years ago was when I got my Mac so that info could be a figment of my imagination. To my knowledge, you don’t need special software for this. t’s within the keyboard settings of system settings… I hate that name with a burning passion… But anyway report back and I’ll try and test this out myself later.
You can, but I disabled it.
fn-e is, I think, the equivalent command if you don't have a globe key. I made my globe key do dictation if you press it twice, which I might disable because I never use it, but I might try messing with it. I just checked, and yes, fn-e and the globe key are equivalent. I did get more characters by going into the tool bar and customizing, I now have runes, but I still don't see some of the alphabetic characters like ae-ligature. I'll have to play around with it some more. It would be nice to be able to write thorn ae-ligature t instead of thaet if I'm doing ANglo-Saxon, for example.
I found some characters.
Apparently things like ae-ligature are in Latin, specifically "accented Latin". I need to chase down things like thorn but that might be in runes. It's kind of funny that there's no way to just access all of the characters. I realize that would be a huge list. But it's surprising that they don't have a way to just show all of the categories. To get to all of them, you have to pick "large window" I think, and that makes the tool bar show up. If you go in there you can pick "customize list" from the menu, and check and uncheck which categories show up when you hit the globe key of fn-e to access characters and symbols.