Life Pro Tip!

You kid, but as an Canadian Anglophone, this is what I do any time I have to send an email to someone with a French name with an accented character.

Yes, I know the special character menu is a thing, but I have shit to do.

I work in IT and I have coworkers that use caps lock to capitalize single letters, like the beginning of a sentence. It hurts a bit every time I see it.

Yes, but you need to be wary of pasting the formatting.

So when you do this, instead of pasting with Control+V you will want to paste without formatting using the Control+Shift+V command.

So remember - if you want that capital 'H' without issues, use your Shift key when pasting what you copy from Wikipedia.

I used to do this, but then I changed to Hat. It's increased my productivity significantly and saves me multiple hours each week.

This but for em dashes

Just take a picture of the Wikipedia page and use OCR. No need for that copy and pasting nonsense.

tHats cool and all but How do I get tHe otHer letters uppercase too

On desktop, how many people search for an emoji, then just copy paste the character into their text?

Instead of switching to the alt keyboard, not that one, the other, no the emoji not the international one, dammit.

Or bringing up the keyboard menu, then scrolling around, looking for the right one, searching, no, scroll, scroll scroll, etc.

Gnome search works also for characters

I do this when writing λ, Δ, Φ, etc. in a document on a computer I don't own or when on my phone. It's genuinely faster than scrolling through Word's symbol list, for example.

Used to work with someone who would recycle characters. Like, instead of typing a letter on the keyboard (which had many keys specifically for this purpose), they would go looking for that letter in some text they were going to discard and Ctrl-X Ctrl-V it.

H

What you have to do to type é on a standard keyboard is white supremacy in action

You joke but Google is the easiest way to get the Euro symbol on a UK keyboard.

Honestly shit like that works really well when half of your notebook's keyboard doesn't work anymore. The on screen keyboard is limited and copy pasting letters from texts can be faster. Especially with special characters. Or when you just need an a or s, opening the on screen keyboard again and again vs copy pasting it once and using it as a source - the second one is faster.

I am very sad and desperate I can't afford a new laptop

I actually do this for complicated letter that I don't know.

Like: ë, ñ, ũ, ü, etc

when I was younger, instead of just using shift, i used to press the caps lock key and then turn it off lol

Presumably the original post was made facetiously, but since a lot of people are talking about special characters in the comments:

I can't confirm anymore, but besides all the alt shortcuts in the comments, in Windows it used to be that you could open the Character Map from the Start menu, then either copy any character from a chart or select the character to see its alt code.

How do you think Mexican people spell year in Spanish if it's not by going to Wikipedia and getting that letter that comes after m and before n in the Mexican alphabet? Eh? Eh? Anios!

This is what I used once when my keyboard broke and some keys stopped working. Even ordering the new keyboard was difficult when I couldn't type my delivery address properly.

That’s how I type everything, I just have pages of pages of text with characters and then I scroll through and click each page where a character may be used

Once, I had a friend who's spacebar failed. I told her to copy-padre the space and go to Goodwill and buy a new keyboard.

I Google for the l and the I when I can't identify them.

I'm still trying to find out how people make that flipped d. /s

On Windows, win+r 'charmap' <enter> in case anyone ever needs it. On other OS/Window managers, I'm not sure off-hand about the shortcuts.

This was how many errors never made it to a newspaper page. Writer fucked up? You go in the trash and you find an H and you stick it over top. Or you ransom-note a whole word that way.

Ain’t nobody got time for printers. There was partying to be done and deadlines.

I have just watched Idiocracy... I can't take it anymore.

There are honestly some people I work with who are like this. It's just as nightmarish as it sounds