Even if it’s your first time using Mac or you have been using it over the years, they are highly specialized things like shortcuts, special Mac symbols, as well as accented characters which may be a whole lot to comprehend.
Mac do not really use Alt codes in typing special symbols. Rather all of the most popular Unicode characters can be typed in straight from the keyboard.
Mac Keyboard Symbols
A standard computer contains 80 keys, thus you can use it to input all of the Unicode characters of which there are about 130,000. In order to understand the symbols, you can simply explore how all the face-value characters change when you combine them with modifier keys. There’s the Control, Option, and Command. You can also combine multiple modifiers together as well. In order to see all Mac Keyboard shortcuts symbols clearly, however, you will have to turn on the full keyboard layout.
How to Display all Mac Keyboard Symbols
Even if you have been using a Mac device for sometime now, here’s what you should know. It is still useful to look at all the possible keyboard combinations once in a while in order to refresh your memory to discover new ways of quickly keying in any information you want.
To see all Mac key symbols at once:
- Visit “System Preferences” – Keyboard
- Check the box close to “Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar”
You can click on the language flag in your menu bar and choose “Show Keyboard Viewer”. The interactive display will pop up displaying all the keyboard symbols and altering the view in real time when you use modifier keys.
How to Make a Copyright Sign on a Mac
Copyright Symbol on Mac
A copyright symbol is used to show that something is copyrighted. This means that the rights to make copies of it are owned by a person or company. The copyright symbol is often seen on the title page of books, the masthead of newspapers and magazines, and on the packaging for items like recorded music, DVDs and computer software.
You can simply type a copyright symbol on a Mac by using the copyright keyboard shortcut. Do this:
- Simply hold down the “Option” Key
- Press the ‘g’ key on the keyboard.
- Note, there are a variety of special symbols you can type by using the Option Key plus another key.
Emoji & Symbols
You can use the “Emoji & Symbols” menu in inserting a wide variety of symbols into a document or another application on a Mac. In order to access this menu:
- Click on the “Edit” menu in any program
- Tap on “Emoji & Symbols”
- You can also access the menu by holding down the “Command” and “Control” keys and clicking the spacebar.
- You can then scroll through the list to locate the symbol you want or search for by typing “copyright” using the search box.
- Once you find the symbol you want, just tap on it and it will pop up where your cursor is positioned in the program you are working in.
Copying a Symbol From Elsewhere
Anytime you want to type a symbol on a computer and you are not sure how to do it in the program you are using:
- Search for another document or a website with the symbol you want.
- Copy it by selecting it and holding down the “Command” Key on your Mac and thereafter tapping the “c” Key.
- Navigate back to your original document and paste it by holding “Command” and tapping “V”.
- If you are making use of a Windows computer, you can use to get Control key instead of the Command key in keyboard shortcuts.