i’m good on spelling and punctuation but when it comes to capitalization, i tend to be somewhat shiftless.
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Like everyone else, I make special exceptions for people I like.
^_^
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The quality of the content overrides any shortcomings in the technical presentation.
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…
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I am a trained Englishtician and I don’t use any of this crap punctuation. Semicolons, eminem dashes, ellipses, dots, umlauts, kumquats, the like: dump that box of junk out the window. All you need are: ?!.:’, and the occasional ".
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BETTER THAN BEING A VERY SHIFTY CHARACTER!!!
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i DoNt KnOw, fRiEnDs, BuT PeOpLe LiKe ThIs ArE nOt To bE tRuStEd.
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In a semi-related rant, I’ve seen people mention “Alt+x” keyboard combinations (here and in other places) for special characters. I just want to annoyingly say: If you’re using Windows, Character Map has been a feature of Windows for decades and you can pull up whatever you need in whatever font you need it. Start>type character map. There are even non-English symbols & characters.
I can’t speak about Apple or Linux, so I don’t know, but this bugs me to no end.
*rant over. And semicolons are underused and unappreciated.
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I hear ya. I’ve known a few colons in my life.
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Macs have always had an extra modifier key, the Option key, which (very) loosely maps to the Alt key. Except that for us, it’s like a higher-order Shift key: whereas shift-8 gets you asterisk*, option-8 gets you bullet•, and shift-option-8 gets you degrees°.
I think on Linux you would run apt-get-punctuation-degree-roman8192 or something equally simple.
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genuinely curious: is there not a GUI way to copy/paste special characters in either Linux or OSX to whatever it is you’re typing? So you don’t have to remember key combinations? I’ve used Character Map for years and I’m puzzled by (ostensibly Windows users) sharing Alt+ combos and it frustrates me.
There definitely is. Character Viewer I think it’s called in OSX. but if I wanted to use three to five mouse clicks per glyph, why put this array of 100+ mechanical switches under my fingers?
= stygmata?
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Because you just can’t remember the Alt key for pounds sterling or was that a tilde or umlaut?
I’m not saying there’s a better way. No quarrel, but some days the GUI is just easier.
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I am extremely good at memorizing esoterica, often serving as a walking password manager at various jobs I’ve held. Yet I never managed to keep more than a half dozen Alt-codes in my head when I used Windows full-time in the workplace. If you have a mnemonic for distinguishing between Alt-0159 and Alt-0161, I’d love to hear it. (But I bet you still remember my explanation of how to type *, •, and ° on a Mac from a few comments ago.)
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I work as a mainframe operator (colloquially known as a “computer operator”). I’m also equally good at what I do. Yes, I know all sorts of cheats and commands and such.
But I haven’t memorized everything. My point is when you’re trying to use symbols, in Windows you can pin Character Map to the taskbar (Launch Bar for you), so you can get to it easily.
Again, I have no quarrel with you, but it seems people act as if this is some mystery, with Alt codes and such. And there’s a GUI tool for that.
To me the only mystery is why they haven’t fixed their error of thirty+ years ago when they ripped off CP/M with a cheap clone based on QDOS that only mapped the lower half of ASCII. Now 90% of the world has no direct access to their language’s entire character set while typing in that language, and have to rely on memorizing esoteric Alt codes, inconsistent “helpful” behavior of various userland apps, or just dumbing shit down and assuming nobody will call them on it. Most people opt (hah!) for the latter, because everybody else is similarly constrained. (Except those of us who aren’t, who are widely regarded as elitists.)
If upper case characters also required such a not-at-all-inconvenient addition to the GUI, would you still be as sanguine about it?
I think we’re wandering off-topic and as such I’m leaving this conversation. Have a good day.
