What do these keys do on my keyboard?

[whocares]

The worst one is ctrl, in all the menu's etc it just has the upward pointing arrow / hat thing but on my british powerbook that symbol isn't there, it just says ctrl. Took me ages to find out which key that meant, especially since I don't know how to type it and so can't search for it! Grrrr

Yeah, I didn't think of that one
Luckily there are very few keyboard shortcuts that actually use the ctrl key
Only ones I can think of are in Photoshop or other pro applications. The combination of Cmd, option and shift already gives you a healthy number of shortcuts

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And as for "hidden" keys like the tilde (~), I generally find that they are hidden in logical places:
* ~ is option+n (think about ñ in Spanish)
* © is option+c
* ® is option+r
* \ is option+shift+:, which on a French keyboard is equivalent to option+/
* etc...

Certainly beats the alt+130 for acute e in the old windows days without an international keyboard. Is this still the case (access to ASCII characters through they numerical value)?

 

[dcv]

It's one of them thar historical accidents. On ancient teletypewriters, there was an up-arrow symbol that was used when it was necessary to print a representation for the control key.

When it came time to turn ASCII into an international character code, they needed a place to put a caret (which could double as a circumflex with overtyping). There was a limited number of characters available, so they decided to repurpose the up arrow.

And so today, we're stuck with one character representation for two entirely different things. Unicode sort of fixed this (the new control symbol is wider and lower), but unless you print the two side by side they still look pretty much the same. (So this one isn't Apple's fault, but given their habit of doing their own thing it's weird that they stuck to the standard when the standard is so goofy!)

Well it's true - you *do* learn something new every day!

I didn't even know Control had a symbol... I mean, I've only ever seen it as 'ctrl' on keyboards.

 

[zudo]

Cheers iMeowBot, amazig the stuff people on here know!

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Certainly beats the alt+130 for acute e in the old windows days without an international keyboard. Is this still the case (access to ASCII characters through they numerical value)?

Sure is better, the situation on windows for accented characters and whatnot is dire, especially for uk keyboards.

It's extremely complicated but to try to give you some idea:
You can still do alt+130 etc but that's stupid hard to learn
In win2k and up you can do altgr+vowel for acute accents only
You can pick US international keyborad (or something like that) and then there are some dead key combos that I can't remember, something like altgr+somekey then the vowel but this is useless for the uk because lots of other normal keys are then in the wrong place, there is no uk international keyboard
You can temporarily switch to spanish (or whatever) keyboard, but again other keys will be in the wrong place
Or finally you can download some hacked special international uk keyboard settings like this http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~johns/kbukint.html which I use

There are more, I saw a webpage listing about 10 options when I was lookign into this but none are simple. Like I said, dire, the mac solution is SOO much better, even if they have robbed me of my hash key!