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robin
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1 year ago
in Accents & The Keyboard Viewer on I Bought a Mac
"The easiest way to figure out umlauts, accents, tilde and carat-ed characters is to open up the “Keyboard Viewer” palette. Sadly, it is buried in the “International” System Preference Pane."
Yeah, that is annoying when you're using that little keyboard all the time. Same thing for the "character palette", too. So annoying that I googled around to see if someone had figured out a shortcut... and I found one :)
The folks at macosxhints have 2 neat little scripts that you can download. You can save each of them as applications, which you then use to open the Keyboard Viewer or the Character Palette.
Now all those scripts are doing is open a hidden file in the System Folder. So I thought, maybe I can find that file and open it directly instead of going through a script and save a few seconds.
And yeah, it's as simple as that: you just have to navigate the path the script follows.
For the Keyboard viewer- System:Library:Components:KeyboardViewer.component:Contents:SharedSupport:KeyboardViewerServer
For the character palette- System:Library:Components:CharacterPalette.component:Contents:SharedSupport:CharPaletteServer
When you get to the .component file, ctrl-click and select "Show package contents" , then keep going.
When you get to the final file (it's an application), just make an alias of it by holding command+option and dropping it on the desktop or something. There you go, a convenient shortcut that gives you that keyboard instantly!
The second method is easier and faster, it works great on Leopard, but I don't know about earlier systems. Doesn't hurt to try, it won't crash any computer.
Yeah, that is annoying when you're using that little keyboard all the time. Same thing for the "character palette", too. So annoying that I googled around to see if someone had figured out a shortcut... and I found one :)
The folks at macosxhints have 2 neat little scripts that you can download. You can save each of them as applications, which you then use to open the Keyboard Viewer or the Character Palette.
Now all those scripts are doing is open a hidden file in the System Folder. So I thought, maybe I can find that file and open it directly instead of going through a script and save a few seconds.
And yeah, it's as simple as that: you just have to navigate the path the script follows.
For the Keyboard viewer- System:Library:Components:KeyboardViewer.component:Contents:SharedSupport:KeyboardViewerServer
For the character palette- System:Library:Components:CharacterPalette.component:Contents:SharedSupport:CharPaletteServer
When you get to the .component file, ctrl-click and select "Show package contents" , then keep going.
When you get to the final file (it's an application), just make an alias of it by holding command+option and dropping it on the desktop or something. There you go, a convenient shortcut that gives you that keyboard instantly!
The second method is easier and faster, it works great on Leopard, but I don't know about earlier systems. Doesn't hurt to try, it won't crash any computer.
1 reply
System Preferences > International >Input Menu
You can then select, via checkbox, Character Pallete and Keyboard Viewer.
At the bottom of the pane you'll see another checkbox titled "Show input menu in menu bar"