# The one symbol not on the QWERTY keyboard that ought to be **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Tags:** computer-hardware\ **Created:** [February 13, 2024, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496 "2024-02-13T00:26:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![ColdBrew50](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e9a140/32.png) [@ColdBrew50](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ColdBrew50)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/61 "2024-02-13T11:22:26Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > Reminds me of [this little dustup](https://lwn.net/Articles/947941/) in the Linux community recently. Dammit. They blew it all up. Maniacs. They had one nice thing, namely, the troff/groff standard and they blew it all up. And I can’t even blame it on the 7-bit ASCII standard…bunch of slobs got lazy and blew it all to hell. Fools. And BTW, you people complaining about capslock can eat me. It’s plenty useful, and if it is not, just make it into something else. Nobody’s forcing you to use the capslock key, nor the Alt-Gr key for that matter. Just put a buffing tool on your dremel and scrawl another symbol on the keycap with a china marker or something. There is never, ever, any reason for a reasonable person to hold down an alt key and type in some numeric code on the ten digit keypad, though. That’s cute for the occasional symbol, but it is risible for anyone who uses any language at all. ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 11:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/62 "2024-02-13T11:50:20Z")
> [@ColdBrew50](#): > > you people complaining about capslock can eat me I mean, I’d rather not. I use caps-lock for SQL but aside from that, various dialects, all of which can be title, camel case or lower case - SQL (and certainly MS SQL) have a tradition of upper case. I find it a very irritating key. The rest… the caret is useful in programming, particularly RegEx. The back tick is used in Kotlin to escape function names, which is great for human readable unit tests (probably in Java too). Accents and umlauts etc are trivial both on Mac and Android. I would kill the “print screen” button. There are many ways to capture a screenshot using software, now built into most modern OSs. The “Insert” button could go, who even uses it, there are keyboard shortcuts, eg, in `vi` you press `i` I don’t really know what I would replace those two keys with. Empty space, maybe? ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/63 "2024-02-13T11:56:30Z")
I’ll just say, it’s a good thing we don’t have a key for the old “Putz!” smiley that we used to have here on the SDMB way back in the old days. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/64 "2024-02-13T11:58:57Z")
As a designer who uses InDesign, I’d like the Em dash and En dash. Why can’t I just use alt codes? I use both Mac and PC. I can’t remember the different keyboard combinations for both platforms. The modifier keys have different names. Regular dashes and underscores are never used in typesetting, so replace that one. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/65 "2024-02-13T12:15:18Z")
> [@Zyada](#): > > As a unixhead and vi aficionado, I second this. > > I think I don’t have a use for square brackets, but everything else gets used a lot You’re a unixhead but you never use arrays in C? Inconceivable! ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/66 "2024-02-13T12:31:11Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > And that’s nice, that _you_ have options (heh), but neither exists on my Dell. Also AltGr-Shift-; in both Linux and Windows using the [“United States–International” layout](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboards/kbdusx). What OS/layout do you use? It does not matter if AltGr is physically printed on your keyboard, for instance I just tried it with on a keyboard with two “Alt” keys: in the “international” layout the right one functions as AltGr. But double-check your layout; if I select “English–South Africa” the degree symbol moves to AltGr-Shift-[ , for example. > [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > Unicode itself is basically unforgivable. Oh my God yes. But much of the mess was inevitable as soon as Unicode promised round-trip compatibility with existing standards; a lot of the damage was already done. > [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > Basically, there is a difference between the ASCII Hyphen-Minus and the Unicode Hyphen. They’re rendered identically, or close to it, but coded differently. One of the tools they use to generate man (help) pages changed the handling so that they used hyphens by default. On this very board, when I want a minus [not a hyphen] I automatically hit the usual key on my keyboard like a normal person and never get a − unless I notice the problem later. > [@ColdBrew50](#): > > capslock FWIW I use it once in a while. Does what it says. > [@Zyada](#): > > As a unixhead and vi aficionado, I second this. PS vim aficionados may know that it supplies its own sort of “compose” command so that by default you can get a degree symbol as Control-K DG and many others using two characters ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/67 "2024-02-13T12:42:43Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > Also AltGr-Shift-; in both Linux and Windows using the [“United States–International” layout](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboards/kbdusx). What OS/layout do you use? It does not matter if AltGr is physically printed on your keyboard, for instance I just tried it with on a keyboard with two “Alt” keys; in the “international” layout the right one functions as AltGr. But double-check your layout; if I select “English–South Africa” the degree symbol moves to AltGr-Shift-[ , for example. I’m using a Dell laptop, “Eng SA - US” keyboard layout, and the righthand Alt is just an alt. Ctrl+Alt doesn’t work, either. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/68 "2024-02-13T14:26:11Z")
Seems to be a problem/bug with Windows 10 as least. If I set the language to English (US) and the keyboard layout to United States–International, AltGr and Control+Alt function to type symbols and accented characters. Keeping the same keyboard layout but selecting Afrikaans or English (South Africa) as the language, it does not work, consistently with what you have observed. The Linux English (South Africa) interestingly includes characters like ˚ and other symbols but also ḽ, Ħ, đ, Ê, ſ , … ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/69 "2024-02-13T14:35:00Z")
What do you mean? What’s a “regular dash”? There’s hyphen, en dash, and em dash, isn’t it? And hyphens are used in stuff like “8-bit” aren’t they? Or is there a generic dash? ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/70 "2024-02-13T14:50:24Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > There’s hyphen, en dash, and em dash, isn’t it? Unicode seems to have around 25 different dash punctuation characters. Knuth’s solution of using macros and ligatures for typesetting markup seems sensible. If your keyboard has more characters, you can use them, but otherwise you can input `---` to get an em dash, for instance. Also e.g. you can type `~` to get a non-breaking space (a unicode non-breaking space would be hard to distinguish in your input file). ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/71 "2024-02-13T15:30:39Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > I use the “Windows” key maybe once a year, and the context menu key precisely never. Setting aside that this thread really is about a bit of fun choosing keys to vote off the island… The Windows key has some nifty uses, in my opinion. Win+R: Opens the “run” dialog Win+L: Locks the PC Win+M: Minimizes all windows Win+V: Opens a neat chooser with the past 25 clipboard history entries so you can paste from any one of them. I am starting to like the Win+V thing–was just looking at a rogue SQL statement, its SQL ID, and its plan hash. I was able to select each in turn and Ctrl-C, and then go elsewhere and use Win+V to allow me to paste each one in different places. This is particularly helpful when dealing with one app that pops open a dialog with multiple blanks to fill, and I need data that was on the screen now blocked by the dialog. Besides that, I use it as a modifier key for some keyboard macros using AutoHotKey ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/72 "2024-02-13T15:47:12Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > Unicode seems to have around 25 different dash punctuation characters. I’m just wondering what the “regular dash” to get rid of that is meant. I assume that’s the hyphen, and I thought that was used in typesetting. I mean, I never manually typeset anything, but when working with QuarkXpress back in the ages with newspaper layouts, we used hyphen, en dash, and em dash. Or at least I thought that was the hyphen we used – it certainly was the key we used. On another note, do Windows keyboards not have the option of holding down a key like you do on an Apple product (whether computer, tablet, or phone) to get other keys? I always found those alt-codes a bit cumbersome (though to this day I remember alt-0150 and alt-0151 by muscle memory for en and em dashes.) I would have thought by now they might adapt a solution like that. The one thing that is annoying, though, is the press-and-hold alternate keys have _almost_ all the Polish letters by default. They have the **ł, ę, ź, ż** and **ś** , but are missing the all-important **ą** for some reason. Annoying today, especially, as it’s Pączki Day here in Chicago and various cities across the US with Polish communities, and I have to either cut-and-paste or switch keyboard layouts to Polish. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/73 "2024-02-13T15:47:23Z")
Least used key: Insert/Help I don’t particularly pine for any characters I can’t invoke (thanks to MacOS where an option key lets you ¢£™€ to your heart’s content and if you use them often at all you’ll have them memorized and not have to open up a keyboard character-finder utility). And for non-character functions, “do this thing when I hit this keystroke” kind of stuff, I have macro utilities for that so I’m mostly already covered. If I could define a truly magic key, I’d want one that would identify what is slowing each and every environment down the most (host OS and virtualized OS’s and the OS’s that I’m remoted into that are running on other hardware), along with a kill button beside each one. The real-life equivalents have to be invoked in each environment separately, and when I need them the most, they, like everything else, take a shitload of a long time to respond, don’t tell me enough of what I really want to know, and the kills are undependable, and there’s no top-level analysis like “it’s the network connection that’s slowing things down in your MacOS 14” versus “it’s the virtualization wrapper’s volume synchronization being inefficient, eating all your VM’s processor cycles” or whatever, instead I have to click around and check disk activity, RAM activity, network activity, arcanely labeled PIDs and processes I don’t recognize, etc etc ---
**Author:** ![Dorjan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dorjan/32/12440_2.png) [@Dorjan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorjan)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/74 "2024-02-13T15:59:52Z")
ä would be nice, since I use it multiple times a day. ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/75 "2024-02-13T16:12:32Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > Bring back the þ. You and your thornography obsession. ;-D ---
**Author:** ![Happy\_Lendervedder](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/happy_lendervedder/32/8488_2.png) [@Happy\_Lendervedder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Lendervedder)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/76 "2024-02-13T17:18:51Z")
I wouldn’t mind common emojis added to the letters, which could be accessed by pressing alt or something. ---
**Author:** ![pjd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pjd/32/3009_2.png) [@pjd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pjd)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/77 "2024-02-13T17:21:35Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > Then I could type: “I’d get rid of þe ^ on þe 6 key.” No. You couldn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Knowed\_Out](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/knowed_out/32/7380_2.png) [@Knowed\_Out](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knowed_Out)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/78 "2024-02-13T17:52:35Z")
Hyphen. It’s tacitly considered taboo. I mean, just look at it. It’s short and stunted. We don’t use hyphenation if a word breaks. We put in soft returns or modify text boxes to keep that from happening. Advertising doesn’t generally use technical terms like “8-bit” since we’re trying to appeal to a broader audience. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/79 "2024-02-13T17:52:43Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > when working with QuarkXpress back in the ages with newspaper layouts, we used hyphen, en dash, and em dash. Or at least I thought that was the hyphen we used – it certainly was the key we used. The hyphen is absolutely used in English, and is not interchangeable with the various dashes. > [@pulykamell](#): > > On another note, do Windows keyboards not have the option of holding down a key like you do on an Apple product (whether computer, tablet, or phone) to get other keys? That is exactly what the Alt-Gr key does, at least under an “international” keyboard layout selected. Except, can you make it work while the language is switched to English (SA) or Afrikaans? That seems to be the trouble. It works OK in English (US). > [@Knowed\_Out](#): > > Hyphen. It’s tacitly considered taboo. I’ll take your word for it, but will keep right on using it in various compound words (e.g., the absent-minded professor). I do not necessarily trust any new-fangled style guide less than 100 or 200 years old. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2024, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496/80 "2024-02-13T17:53:58Z")
> [@Knowed\_Out](#): > > Advertising doesn’t generally use technical terms like “8-bit” since we’re trying to appeal to a broader audience. I mean, there are many other hyphenated words other than “8-bit”—that was just the first example to come to mind. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-one-symbol-not-on-the-qwerty-keyboard-that-ought-to-be/997496.md?page=5)