why isn't • an allowed character for lists?! You allow -, +, and *. You can type • trivially on the only OS Gruber gives a shit about. What the fuck?
p.s. can someone confirm the alt keyboard codes were already part of OS X in 2006? I guess I wouldn't know (yes, @graham could and did)
Option+8.
Every key has has alternate symbols if you press Option+key and Option+Shift+Key. I don't remember most of them but I feel like the other useful ones are n-dash (Option+minus sign), m-dash (Option+Shift+minus sign), and degrees (Option+0)
Gotcha. I knew that these shortcuts existed, I think even from the original Macintosh in 1984, definitely by System 6 in 1988, I have a Macintosh SE/30 that I keep on that OS. But I never bothered to learn most of them haha. Opt+f creates a weird script f that seems to be a shorthand for "folder" to some early Mac users. crazy we have 30 year old shortcuts for some of these things.
oh, that rules that they go back that far. I wonder how far back Apple using emac–style keyboard shortcuts (e.g., Control+a to go to beginning of line/input) goes. Maybe as far?
Also, nested into several layers of comments is where I can safely admit that ƒ is how I write my 'f's. I don't really know why. I always assumed I picked it up from writing ∫ symbols in high school/university math
Decided to look up how far back these go, here's an excerpt from a wonderful website with tons of stories told by the original Mac team:
The Macintosh's character encoding scheme allocated the upper half of the 8-bit character set to occasionally useful but obscure characters that were not portrayed on the keys, accessed with the option key, that were nearly impossible to remember. Steve Capps conceived of a desk accessory called "Key Caps" (named partially after himself?) that displayed a picture of the keyboard, with the keycaps changing depending on the meta-keys that were pressed, which allowed you to hunt for the special characters visually. He coded it up quickly and it became another great addition.
The emacs bindings I'm fairly sure were from NeXTStep, in an effort to make Unix not just a foundation for the OS but to make diehard Unix users at home even in the GUI.
whoa, that rules. Shout out to Steve Capps for making one of the first on-screen keyboards
And oh, yeah. That coming from NeXTStep would make a ton of sense. I kind of forget that macs weren't always as Unix-y except when I run into the weirdness around how ':' and '/' are treated in Finder vs the terminal
Yeah, it's kinda weird how harmonious it all ended up, honestly.
Though for what it's worth, OS X did kinda mess up the Finder. You can kind of get back the pre-OS X behavior, if you hide the toolbar in a Finder window.
Folders will then open in new windows, and the key is, these windows remember location. Whenever you open that folder, its window will come back to where it was when you last closed it.
This is one of those things that's so simple that it sounds dumb, yet it's critically important to people who are used to it. When it's gone it's like your desk drawers are changed around, or perhaps all the desk drawers are now the same drawer and there's some unintuitive technique for getting the things you want to appear in it. Old school Mac users learned to count on this behavior being rock solid and consistent.
And OS X...kinda fumbled it. Sure you could hide the toolbars and enter "spatial Finder" mode, but sometimes the toolbars just return for no clear reason, disabling the mode. And it's been rocky how reliable, or not, this has stayed from version to version. John Siracusa used to have legendary rants about this back when he wrote the reviews of OS X for Ars Technica. (which is honestly probably the only reason I care, I grew up mostly on Windows and so never learned to count on this behavior.)
god, I can totally see how you might build a workflow around that. I know when apple changed the virtual desktops so they couldn't be in a square I never fully recovered a level of productivity
Personally I mourn Palm webOS. It's still my ideal mobile multitasking paradigm, and I am ready to rant about it haha, though probably in a new post since this comment thread is getting kinda claustrophobic
ooh, I'd like to read that. It always looked cool but I never had one. And yeah, I've been reading these from the notifications because this is getting silly
the real question is, could you type it when the markdown spec was initially laid out (like... 2006 or whatever)
As far as I can remember, you could all the way back to 2002 at least, since I was regularly using shift + option + 8 for the degree symbol on AOL Instant Messenger and sometimes didn't hit shift, so I'd get the symbol you shared above
yes. you could
but it would require gruber knowing how to handle utf-8 characters and knowing how to handle them in perl 5
