♫“Do you want to CTRL|⌘+V a ☃?…”♫
August 18, 2015 5:32 PM   Subscribe

Nick O’Neill gave us ».net, «.net, ›.net, ‹.net, ”.net, “.net, ’.net, and ‘.net.
Leo Wallentin gave us –.net, ≈.net, ≠.net, ·.net, ½….net, and →.net.
Alix Land gave us ←.net and copypastecharacter.com for building lists of all the characters you might want to copy and paste.
posted by Going To Maine (12 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
why did you put every single pair of quote marks in the wrong order?

you're making me twitch.
posted by andrewcooke at 5:43 PM on August 18, 2015 [7 favorites]


Emoji blue?
posted by lukemeister at 5:43 PM on August 18, 2015


Cool! copypastecharacter.com is a good site to keep bookmarked.
Edit: the use of Flash to allow "click to copy" is unavoidable, but disappointing for mobile or no-plugin browsers.

If you’re on Windows, you can use WinCompose to insert a lot of these characters. I set the compose key to CapsLock, which has the added benefit of disabling CapsLock. It’s led to me using em dashes more often—a.k.a. CapsLock+---. (CapsLock+:) = ☺, and you can define your own shortcuts for emoji like 😊.)
posted by Rangi at 5:46 PM on August 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've been using FreeCompose on my Windows netbook for a while and really like it. Although it looks like WinCompose can be configured through a dotfile, much easier than FreeCompose which seems to require registry editing to do that.

(Also, guillemets can be used «like this», »like this«, or even »like this» depending on the language! That should either help with the twitching, or make it worse.)
posted by traveler_ at 5:59 PM on August 18, 2015


»like this»
Heresy and madness. Just imagine parsing HTML that looked like >b>>i>this>/i>>/b>.
posted by Rangi at 6:32 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Also try Shapecatcher.com, which attempts to match your drawings with unicode.
posted by adept256 at 7:45 PM on August 18, 2015


Some operating systems have special-character lists built in, so you can copy/paste from that instead of a web page. My main use of this in OS X was to get the dagger, until I finally realized that opt-t works.

Now I'm so happy.

†: Really, this makes me happy.
‡: As does this.*
*: I don't really care for asterisks, but I have to admit that may be because I write a lot of Markdown.§
§: Y'know, Markdown
¶: I'm done. I promise.
posted by cardioid at 8:29 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


> the use of Flash to allow "click to copy" is unavoidable

Rangi: Not entirely! Some browsers allow native (JS) click-to-copy. From looking at this project I work on, it seems it's Chrome version 43.0.2356 and later, Firefox version 41.0 and later, and Microsoft Edge. I think IE 10 and 11 also support document.execCommand("copy"), but they bring up a security warning alert box, so you might as well just stick with flash at that point.
posted by cardioid at 8:38 PM on August 18, 2015


I… have the most commonly used HTML entities memorized (… “ — † etc.) almost entirely because of MetaFilter. I used a Chromebook pretty exclusively for a while, so I didn't have access to using ALT+keypad codes.
posted by ob1quixote at 9:30 PM on August 18, 2015


I tried to get 🐴.horse, but it was taken.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 10:58 PM on August 18, 2015 [5 favorites]


I love the Mac because of small details like the built-in key combinations for typographically necessary characters – dashes, ‘curly’ quotes, ellipses… and the insanely feature-complete built-in character picker (so feature-complete it doubles as a radical-stroke Chinese character dictionary), which puts MS Office’s jerry-rigged special character dialogs and alt-code hacks (all stuck in the mid-90s and so terribly confused about glyphs, characters, and encodings) to shame.

Mac tip: if you type in a second language or need more characters, use this tool to create your own custom keyboard layout.

And tip for Emacs users (recent versions): insert any unicode character by name or hex code using command insert-char (C-x 8), as in C-x 8 snowman for ☃. Because the command has tab-completion, I usually find what I need even with a very fuzzy memory of the official name.
posted by ormon nekas at 1:29 AM on August 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, ormon nekas, Ukelele is a great little tool. A while ago I used it to make a keyboard layout I call Bubble Keys ⓣⓗⓐⓣ◯ⓛⓔⓣⓢ◯ⓨⓞⓤ◯ⓣⓨⓟⓔ◯ⓛⓘⓚⓔ◯ⓣⓗⓘⓢ but I'm sure there are other, much more useful things you can do with it too.
posted by metaphorever at 6:46 AM on August 20, 2015


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