If you are chatting or hanging out on sites like Facebook or MySpace regularly you are often inclined to spice up your messages. Many users make use of so called emoticons like :) to express feelings or their state of mind, some on the other hand would like something special, and that’s where special characters come into play.
The basics are always the same to write a heart or other symbols in chat, text editors and practically any place with text input on the Internet. Hold down the ALT key on the keyboard, press a number on the numeric keypad afterwards and release the ALT key again. Laptop users often need to press Fn instead for the same effect.
Special characters are available on numbers 1 to 31, here is the complete list.
- ☺
- ☻
- ♥
- ♦
- ♣
- ♠
- •
- ◘
- ○
- ◙
- ♂
- ♀
- ♪
- ♫
- ☼
- ►
- ◄
- ↕
- ‼
- ¶
- §
- ▬
- ↨
- ↑
- ↓
- →
- ←
- ∟
- ↔
- ▲
- ▼
The number in front refers to the keys that need to be pressed to create the special character. Desktop users need to use the numeric keypad for this, laptop users without a numeric keypad need to locate the blue keys on their keyboard which substitute the keypad.
The easiest way to test them is to click in the address bar of the web browser, and start testing the characters in there. To write a heart symbol one would press ALT, then the 3 on the numeric pad before releasing ALT again. The character appears after the ALT key is released.
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It’s broken in KDE:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103788
Works fine in Gnome, though, thanks!
Doesn’t work in Gnome. But it works in Windows…
Better to use an app like “mapofchars” to get the ALT codes:
http://www.coolwintools.com/freeware.php3
To say this works in “Windows” is not specific enough or accurate. Yes….it works when typing the characters into the Firefox address box, but it doesn’t work (for one example) when creating a document in WordPerfect.
Works in Chrome (Windows 7 Ultimate x64) ☺
Doesn’t seem to work for me, might be because I’ve got other languages installed though.