Gregory's Server@mathewi I learned the arcane arts of alt + 0233 in the 1990s.
There are some who say this hidden apocrypha can still be deciphered in the scrolls of Character Map.
Praise the Omnissiah!
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17 comments
@tml @mathewi I'm being very tongue in cheek about the old work arounds for non english language supports. It used to be a major pain in the petoot to switch keybaord language modes. For anyone in Canada trying to type in French we had to learn the char map codes for non English characters or just omit accents.  @wandrecanada @tml @mathewi Instructions to install keyboard layouts with accented letters: http://www.igaidhlig.net/en/category/accented-letters/ Of course, getting these layouts installed in school networks can be a problem, especially when they have been outsourced... @gunchleoc @wandrecanada @tml @mathewi After installing a second keyboard/language layout, you can hold down right-Alt and Shift to switch between them (I have ENG and ISL installed and I just discovered that you can press the Windows key and space together instead). Then I just hit the accent key followed by the character I want accented. Alternately, you can pop up the on-screen keyboard (it can be complicated so search for it in the task-bar search field). @EvilKiru @gunchleoc @tml @mathewi Yep all good suggestions. Alt-Shift was added to Win 8 natively and it's a very powerful tool for multi lingual support. There were some earlier tools around as well but I haven't seen anything from the 90s when it was a pain point for me. I think there were some macro style work arounds? @wandrecanada I just tested creating a custom layout - it still works in Windows 11 https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-custom-keyboard-layout-windows/  @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi I guess you could map a key to open the Beyoncé Wikipedia article  @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi I remapped caps lock to compose so typing is <caps lock> <'> <e>. It works really well @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi you can do it with alt gr but I didn't learn about this until I was setting up a mechanical keyboard for the first time and it requires specific keyboard layouts to be selected to get the extra layer of diacritics. @tml @wandrecanada @mathewi sorry missed the 'in Windows' no idea if there is an equivalent. @wandrecanada @mathewi the first computer i had connected to a modem wouldn't type "@". It was in the keyboard but the old shoebox wouldn't recognize it. So i used to copy email addresses and "trim" the @ to reuse it. Then I learned the alt+shift thing  @wandrecanada @mathewi alt 130 in this case, those were the days... My mind still mentions 225 when I see ß  @wandrecanada @mathewi I recently discovered that that was only possible from the numeric keypad |
@wandrecanada @mathewi Why do it simply when you can do it in a complicated and mysterious fashion, you mean? Are there really no keyboard layouts for English in Windows that would provide dead diacritics or other trivial and mnemonic way to get common accented letters? Numeric codes are so last century. Sorry.