If you type in other languages just often enough to find it difficult to remember key combinations to get you the right accented letter you're looking for, check out the CharacterPal Widget (for Macs, with instructions for accessing the Character Map for Windows).
Hovering over the letter or symbol you want will tell you the keystroke, in beautiful, Mac-designed fashion...the Windows equivalent is sooo 1993.
This? Is amazing. It will save me hours of precious time spent testing all the key combinations I can remember. "Is it Opt-R? No. Opt-2? No. Opt-Ctrl-Shift-Open Apple-1-0-9? Huh, no, not that one either." Genious.
view kristin11's profile
Why the unneccessary dig at Windows? I like Macs, but I really don't get the whole "we need to assert our superiority" thing.
view Ondrej's profile
Ondrej - I work in Windows on all my computers. From a design/usability perspective, in this regard, I think that Windows really lacks in comparison. The format and usability haven't changed in over a decade (and it's silly that it hasn't), that's all I'm commenting on.
view kate's profile
This is actually really unnecessary. Just turn on your character palette in the menu bar by going to System Prefs > International > Input Menu.
Check the On box for "Character Palette" and also check the box at the bottom for "Show input menu in menu bar"
Now that I've done that, I have a little US flag in my menu bar, and when I right-click it it shows me a character palette that lets me select whatever character I want and simply inserts it wherever I had my text cursor. I've never had to remember weird key combinations and I never plan to - this is so much more elegant for the special characters I don't use every day.
view melanie's profile
I've been using character palette but this widget is elegant.
view ebrown's profile