April 23, 2010

The Alt+Keyboard Trick

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

One sure-fire way to get foreign characters, as well as special symbols, into your text on a Windows computer is to use something I call the Alt+Keyboard trick.

The Alt+Keyboard trick has been around since the first days of the PC. It worked the same then as it does today:

  1. Press and hold the Alt key on the keyboard. Either Alt key works.
  2. Type a number on the numeric keypad; Num Lock must be on.
  3. Release the Alt key.

When you release the Alt key, a character appears. The character is represented by the code you type.

Back in the first days of the PC, there were only 256 codes you could type, the basic 256 ASCII and Extended ASCII characters. So typing Alt+6,5 produced the character for code 65, which is an upper case A.

That trick still works today: Try it anywhere in Windows: Ensure that Num Lock is on, then press and hold the Alt key, type 6 and then 5 on the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key. A.

With modern versions of Windows, you have more than 256 characters to choose from. Instead, you have the entire armada of Unicode characters. The technique still works the same: To produce the Yin-Yang symbol, type Alt+4042. You get ࿊.

(Yeah, that’s a teeny Yin-Yang.)

Here is a link to a list of decimal Unicode values and symbols. Ensure that you always find decimal unicode values; most often Unicode is shown in hexadecimal and the Alt+keyboard trick doesn’t work with hex values. (Hex values can include the letters A through F.)

Also keep in mind that not every unicode character might available to your PC. Some fonts are not able to display some of the more unique unicode characters. You can confirm what displays well by viewing the link (above): If you see a square or blank, then the character isn’t available on your computer’s font.

4 Comments

  1. Are you certain NUM LOCK needs to be “on” ? This was not true in the days of MS-DOS.

    Comment by sean bernard — April 23, 2010 @ 6:32 pm

  2. I tried it with Num Lock on and off, and it worked consistently with Num Lock on.

    You’re correct: In the days of DOS, Num Lock didn’t need to be on.

    Comment by admin — April 23, 2010 @ 8:10 pm

  3. With this, you can make faces like:

    ¯\(°_o)/¯ õ_ô

    Comment by linuxlove — April 24, 2010 @ 9:22 am

  4. Pretty cool. Now make a macro for them and use them at your whim!

    Comment by admin — April 24, 2010 @ 9:32 am

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