March 25, 2016

The Hat Trick

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Computer nerds enjoy the cryptic and the arcane. Specifically, symbols are something that the most Aspergy among us thrive in using. They offer the joy of being both convenient and cryptic, which should delight anyone, even a Vulcan.

I’m directly addressing the ^ symbol, found on your computer’s keyboard hovering above the 6 key. This character is often called the caret, and it’s not something the computer inherited from its typewriter ancestor.

A caret is traditionally an editing mark. It goes below the text to indicate insertion of a word or phrase. If you call the ^ symbol a caret, you betray your editorial or writing background. That’s because most computer users refer to the symbol as a “hat.” Some newbies incorrectly refer to it as an up-arrow. I’ve heard people call it a circumflex, but that term applies only when the ^ appears above a vowel, as it does in several languages.

To a nerd, however, the ^ was known as “control.” It indicates a control character, a key combination or code, such as ^C, which a proto-nerd would pronounce as “control see.”

The ^ was ubiquitous throughout early computer documentation. I remember seeing a manual for a communications program that used the ^ character throughout to document the various keyboard shortcuts. It really made the thing read like the text was encrypted. I was delighted.

Apple borrowed this type of symbolism heavily with the first Macintosh back in the early 1980s. The Command key sported the cloverleaf symbol. Keyboard shortcuts were documented in print and onscreen using that symbol, ⌘-C for Copy for examples. They even employed a special keyboard symbol for the option key: ⌥, when that key was later added to the Mac keyboard.

Since the mid-1990s, however, most documentation forgoes the symbols and uses keycap abbreviations. The ^C shortcut has become Ctrl+C or even Control-C, ⌘C is Command+C, and ⌥C is Alt+C. But back in the day, ^ was the “control” symbol.

And, yes, ^^ is known as “control control.” The control-^ character code is 30 decimal or 0x1E. It’s known as the record separator. That’s classic nerd trivia.

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