Option 6 and option 7 respectively: § ¶; use them all the time, hence among those I’ve memorized.
No, I mean, on an Apple device, you just, say, hold the key “e” down and get a popup where you can choose èéêëěẽēėę.
Exactly. Which seems weird to me to get rid of the hyphen. I use it far more in communication than an en or em dash. (Though I did use an em dash in my previous post). Hyphens for word breaks and compound adjectives (including surnames.) En dashes for ranges, multi-compound adjectives. Em dash to set off something. Whether you put a space before and after one or not is a matter of whatever stylebook you’re using; I’ve also seen en dashes with spaces on either side used as one might use an em dash. It varies by stylebook and what variety of English you are writing in.)
Used a ton by shell script programmers, so that one would be pretty hard to kill.
As someone else said, I use 'em all, so it would be hard to kill one. The large/small currency symbols (dollar/cent, pound/pence, etc.) seem like candidates to kill, not add, though of course then there’s the fact that $ is often used in scripting as well…
Maybe just add a few keys? The current number isn’t magic (nor has it been static: 7-row keyboards had a few more).
The only ALT+ character code I have memorized is ° so that, I guess. It’s the powers of 2: 248.
Obscure but I use the tick at keyboard’s upper left as a non-text prefix for some barcode fonts.
I remind all Windows Caps Lock haters to enable Toggle Keys which makes a little beep when Caps, Scroll or Num Lock is pressed.
Meh – just use whatever the replacement symbol decided on is. Don’t have to change your muscle memory or anything. Granted, it will look odd (like with cent or Euro signs. Seriously, though I don’t understand the clamoring for a cent sign. Are we in the 1800s or something where single- or double-digit cents are relevant?)
ETA: And, wait. I’m reading that ` is deprecated by $() syntax. At least in bash shells. So, hey, we can always deprecate it. Unless there’s other uses. I don’t do a lot of shell scripting as is obvious.
Mayyybe. To use the replacement, it needs to be the same codepoint. Or you have to add it to all the shell interpreters. It’s not trivial.
As you can tell, I’m in 100 percent* agreement re not wanting a cent sign!
*Not using percent symbol in case it’s the one that goes away 
On a manual typewriter, you can type a ‘c’ and then backspace to type a ‘/’ over it.
Nowadays I see the cents sign used incorrectly more often than correctly (as in, for example, 0.99 cents).
I am so used to that, that on my Mac I setup a keyboad shortcut Apple-L
Never trust a co-worker. Never. Not fot a second. Always lock.
I have a number of funny stories which are outside the scope of this discussion about leaving your machine unlocked.
If you’re using Windows, the Windows key plus semicolon brings up an emoji picker.
I remember them as having a dedicated key for it somewhere off to the right of the colon / semicolon key.
** off to google some images **
yeah, with the “@” on the same key.
There’s already a comma on the keyboard, but I want one on the right by the number pad. You could make those extra-long + and Enter keys a little shorter and tuck the comma in below, right next to the decimal.
I wonder how many people use a full keyboard with num pad and everything. It seems the trend is not to these days, but a lot of people here are talking about those extended keys. My wife is a programmer, and she uses the more compact laptop-style keyboard for her work. I like my number pad, so even though now I use my laptop as my main computer connected to two other monitors, I use a Bluetooth keyboard with all the keys on it.
I didn’t mean to step on anybody’s toes, especially over the hyphen, but it’s probably something unique to my line of work. I’ve had so many copy editors flag my designs for containing a hyphen, I’ve considered pulling that particular key off my work laptop.
Some popular typewriters have a ¢ sign, e.g. the Remington Portable Nos. 1, 2, 3. Therefore it was not considered very superfluous, even though there was not a huge number of extra keys.
Today, well, inflation…
WE DO NOT!!!
I’d personally love to have the Scroll Lock key removed (and the function disabled entirely). I have never found it useful… and the number of times where I’ve somehow hit it by mistake, utterly screwing up navigation in spreadsheets, is beyond countability. At least on my external keyboard, it’s a separate, visible key; I usually hit it by mistake when using a laptop keyboard, then I can never figure out which key it was (as, if it’s visible at all, it’s in a funny-colored font on the side of one of the keys).
I’d argue agains removing the forward slash on the numeric keypad - if you’re tying a lot of numbers / formulas, you might well want to do a division. Note that it has *, - and +.
The “num lock” key there, though… if I turn that off, it means I can use those same keys as arrow keys… but if your keyboard is big enough to use the numeric keypad, you’ve got dedicated arrow keys anyway. At the least, anything that expects actual input ought to be able to disable accepting input from those keys if num-lock is off. If my PIN is 1234, it should not attempt to accept end-down-pgdown-left, and throw an error! I live in fear of the day when I determinedly enter my computer unlock code “correctly” enough times that I lock myself out entirely!
For special characters, an alternative would be to have a second set of characters for each key. e.g. “4” = “4”. “shift-4” = “$”. “alt-shift-4” = “€” or whatever. I truly don’t see any of the actual character keys going away, for anyone doing anything remotely technical; I personally use pretty much all of them at one point or another.
Other nominees for the alt-shift third character, just off the top of my head:
- Euro symbol.
- Single quote that REMAINS single quote, as opposed to getting turned into open / close quotes e.g. ‘quoted word’ versus
'quoted word'. Yes, for business purposes, the translation is often appropriate, any many technical uses do just fine with treating that key’s output as a regular single quote, but there are times when you just want to be SURE. - Accented letters, e.g. the Spanish n as in (Muñoz) or accented e as in Renée. Phone keyboards are better there, since you can usually get to those by long-pressing a key.
- Combo letters like æ.
- Inverted punctuation such as is used in Spanish - ¿Que? ¡Que!
From a 'murkin point of view, I may not need characters like those every day, but I need 'em just often enough that it’d be really nice to not have to look up their ASCII codes (or a website to copy and paste them).
** raises hand **
As with you, I’m on a laptop but I use an external keyboard unless I’m on a train or something. I got all the keys, and very nice keys they are at that (“Saratoga” ADB Extended Keyboard II with Alps switches).
It amuses my office-mate how often she hears the telltale beeps from my desk.
I do database work, and while I can get by with the compact laptop style, I’ve occasionally been issued a larger-format laptop which has (among other things) a separate numeric keypad. Much better in every way.
Like @AHunter3, however, I use an external keyboard most of the time. I hate having to use the onboard keyboard when I’m travelling (the external one is just too bulky to travel with).
Yeah, when I have the IT folks order me a new laptop, I have to specify that it have the number pad, otherwise I don’t get it.