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chriselgee/UnicodeTyping.md

Last active February 14, 2020 13:22
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UnicodeTyping.md

Typing special characters:

  • In Windows, the simplest way to type special characters is with the Character Map, or charmap.exe. Scroll through, double-click the ° symbol you need, click Copy, and you can Paste it into your application. Notice though - while it's selected, there are codes at the bottom. On the left is the Unicode code, U+00B0. This means that the system stores the degree character as hex 00 and B0. (Who cares? We'll come back to it.) On the right, you see Alt-0176. This means that when NumLock is turned on, you can hold Alt and type 0176 on the number pad and get a degree symbol.
  • In Linux, we need that Unicode code. Press Ctrl-Shift-U, then type 00B0 and hit enter or space or whatever. The ° appears!

If you need to type something you haven't found in charmap, you can Google it. The lobster emoji, for example, is apparently 1F99E. So, on my Linux system, I hit Ctrl-Shift-U, enter the code, and get 🦞!

Want to type a lobster in Win 10? If you're up-to-date on patches, you can hold Win and press . or ; to get the emoji picker.

Mac user? See if this helps: https://poynton.ca/notes/misc/mac-unicode-hex-input.html

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