6 ms·

The history of Alt+number sequences

120 points by ingve 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rob74 2y ago
> This means that whether the Alt+… value is taken mod 256 depends on what kind of control you are typing into. By default, the value is taken mod 256, and Alt+9731 gives you a heart. But if you happen to be using a RichEdit control, then the Alt+… value is taken mod 65536, and Alt+9731 gives you a snowman. And that is why some people hate Windows with so much passion. Not that other OSes don't have their peculiarities of course...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jmclnx 2y ago
[flagged]
ttrrooppeerr 2y ago
> For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. To this day, this remains the best way to insert the character, I have tried the PowerToys Quick Accent [1] but I had so many missed characters when typing fast. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-accent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-ac...
- Frieren 2y ago
  > this remains the best way to insert the character The best way is to use a Spanish-layout keyboard. Otherwise, Alt is a useful hack.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  On many Euro keyboards it's just ~n, as ~ is a dead (modifier) key. But on Windows I do miss the way on macOS and iOS you get access to variants of a basic letter by pressing and holding the respective key.
- robertoandred 2y ago
  I prefer holding n and then pressing 1.
- hnbad 2y ago
  I use WinCompose, which is a Windows implementation of an XCompose style compose key. It comes with a number of composition sequences but you can also add your own. I have mapped it to the "menu" key which I never use so "ñ" is <Menu>,<~>,<n> or <Menu>,<n>,<~> (both work by default). For acute/grave accents I have a dead acute/grave key on my keyboard and because it's a German layout I already have the umlauts as separate keys. For "ë" and such I can compose the letter with <"> to get the diacritic version.
theonealtair 2y ago
I learned about the Alt characters a long time ago when I wanted to type “Pokémon” in the gamefaqs message boards. I never knew until now why higher numbers didn’t do anything different.
Workaccount2 2y ago
TIL that the reason these alt+ sequences never worked for me is because you have to use the number pad...
- rep_lodsb 2y ago
  Fun fact: On a DOS PC, typing these codes was possible even on a keyboard without a number pad, by using the cursor keys instead. This works because those keys produce the same scan codes (with the only difference being either the presence or absence of some prefix byte, depending on the NumLock state). 0 = Ins, 1 = End, 2 = Down, 3 = PgDn, 4 = Left, 6 = Right, 7 = Home, 8 = Up, 9 = PgUp (and by exploiting the mod 256 parsing, it should always be possible to find a code that doesn't contain the digit 5) Don't know if Windows emulates this, probably not. I wouldn't be surprised though if some part of the Windows keyboard driver translates the (different) scancodes sent by an USB keyboard into the legacy ones, just like the Alt+number handling does expect codepage 437 when there is no leading zero :) Some might say that this kind of "cruft" is what makes Windows a horrible OS - but IMHO it's really cool to find such backwards compatibility, and sad when it goes away for no good reason, to be replaced with entirely new cruft that logs everything you do on your "Personal" Computer and sends it to some cloud service...
- novagameco 2y ago
  Some laptops will map 789uiojkl to the keypad with fn
Aardwolf 2y ago
It would be great to make this feature relevant again but use decimal unicode codes, and have it work in linux too this way; it can be really useful now and then (as an alternative to looking up the unicode character on the internet and copypasting it) I remember using this back in the day for ALT+0160 to type non breaking space, which could do funny things in forums and chat programs like MSN and ICQ
- Tblue468 2y ago
  > It would be great to make this feature relevant again but use decimal unicode codes, and have it work in linux too this way [...] IBus[1] can (apparently) do that! [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IBus#Unicode_input https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IBus#Unicode_input
- _flux 2y ago
  I think urxvt has this feature, but it's also available via the Universal Input Method System in many widget sets and it is supported by both Gtk and Qt (might need some additional packages to be installed/setup). So I can just type the symbol in hexadecimal with Ctrl+Shift+U 2 6 0 3 Enter to enter . I used to remember the unicode symbol for long dash—but now that I use EUR keymap I don't need to, and I've forgotten it :). edit: oh crud, HN filters snowmans :(.
  - Freak_NL 2y ago
    Just enable the compose key and forget all about having to memorize numbers. Just tap [compose][-][-][-] for —, and [compose][-][-][.] for –.
    - kps 2y ago
      Compose is nicely user-extensible (~/.XCompose) for those with domain-specific needs; it's one of the few workstation-era holdovers that DesktopLinux™ hasn't ruined yet.
    - Lammy 2y ago
      This is by far the most intuitive way to me. I rely on it even on Windows thanks to WinCompose instead of trying to memorize these alt-codes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mirror/libX11/master/nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mirror/libX11/master/nls/e... http://wincompose.info/ http://wincompose.info/
wojtczyk 2y ago
My first keyboard on a 286 didn't have: alt+039:' alt+060:< alt+062:> They are still burned in my memory.
K7PJP 2y ago
Ah, is this one of the reasons Windows users are so attached to full-sized keyboards with numpads? In any discussion of TKL-or-smaller keyboards, there’s a cohort of people baffled at how any keyboard without a numpad could be fit for purpose. I take it this Windows feature is among the reasons why.
- TylerE 2y ago
  My biggest beef with TKL is not having a full sized, edge places enter key to thwack.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    You're not alone on that. I use a topre-switched TKL in the office and find myself uselessly hitting the corner of the keyboard every so often.
    - TylerE 2y ago
      Same. When my mostly beloved Microsoft Natural got too mushy and wobbly to tolerate anymore, I replaced it with a TKL which I tolerate but don't love. If I had it to do over again I'd get a full sized. For my home rig I'm running a kbdfans odin which is a non-standard layout that gives you 99% of a full size layout but in a size only about 2.5 keys wider than a typical tkl. (Example: https://kbdfans.com/cdn/shop/products/9_08accc65-e9f0-4455-a2eb-6e52bf6dc578_720x.jpg?v=1678267523 https://kbdfans.com/cdn/shop/products/9_08accc65-e9f0-4455-a...)
      - snvzz 2y ago
        Realforce R3HC13[0] is what I have. They have variants that are full-sized, which is what I'll get for home soon. Probably a 45g one rather than 30g, so that I can test the difference. 0. https://www.realforce.co.jp/products/R3HC13/ https://www.realforce.co.jp/products/R3HC13/
        TylerE 2y ago
novagameco 2y ago
alt-255 alt-255 alt-30 alt-30 alt-255 alt-30 new friends can't triforce
- Sabinus 2y ago
  What a blast from the past. This was my introduction to alt codes.
UI_at_80x24 2y ago
Back in my BBS days I would use ALT+255 to create a <null> blank character. Windows couldn't display it, but the FTP programs I used could. That made it fun/easy to "hide" an FTP server dump location on a windows server. The windows admin could see that the drive was filling up but not which directory was the cause. Linux could see it. And so could my FTP client. (Enter fond memories of using FXP here too) For multiple layers of chaos I might create multiple "blank" directories but only store the 'real' files multiple layers deep. For added "legitimacy" I might include the contents of \system or \print or something. I can't remember exactly.
- TimTheTinker 2y ago
  We used the Alt+255 trick in my high school computer lab (windows 3.1) to hide games like Doom and Descent. It worked great because for some reason, if I recall correctly, the `dir /s` command would not traverse into directories with that name, so recursive directory searches for "DOOM.EXE" would turn up nothing. Also, folders with that name wouldn't appear in Windows. To break out of the managed environment, someone figured out they could hit Ctrl+Break at the text-mode login screen - this would drop you to a DOS prompt. But the lab admin got wise to that and blocked that key combination. I figured out a workaround: Alt+3. It would send an ASCII code that the input would interpret identically to Ctrl+Break, and we were back in business :-)
  - rep_lodsb 2y ago
    I'm somewhat skeptical about folders not appearing, the Alt+255 character is just a non-breaking space, and should display as such: the name will appear to be blank, but with a clickable folder icon. However, I can confirm that DIR /S doesn't enter directories starting with that character - TIL! From reading the source code[1], this happens because it requires the name to be alphabetically below something called the "temp name", which is initialized to start with this character. What the code seems to be doing is selection sort, finding the first (alphabetically lowest) subdirectory that hasn't been entered yet, by reading the entire directory each time and comparing all the names. Not very efficient, but excusable if it saved some memory. [1] https://github.com/Hengle/ms_dos_6_0_source_code/blob/master/ms_dos_6_0_source_code/dos-6.0/cmd/command/dir.asm#L1102 https://github.com/Hengle/ms_dos_6_0_source_code/blob/master... -- temp name init is at line 1767
TuringNYC 2y ago
When we were learning typing in high school, some of the geekier kids were using alt-224, etc to selectively replace some English chars with Greek ones. The not-so-techy teacher were scratching her head on how we were typing in Greek.
felideon 2y ago
Fond memories of having a handy cheatsheet printed out for doing homework and chatting on MSN Messenger, until of course I memorized them (or maybe I printed it for the benefit of others). It was always odd to me that é was out of sequence: Alt+160 => á Alt+130 => é Alt+161 => í Alt+162 => ó Alt+163 => ú Alt+164 => ñ Alt+165 => Ñ Most people with US keyboards had no idea how to type ñ/Ñ, the most important out of the bunch.
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  It's even better on macOS. opt-n <char> for ñõã mark opt-e <char> for éíóú mark opt-i <char> for îûôê mark opt-u <char> for üöïë mark Add a shift to capitalize it. I have an AutoHotkey script to get this on Windows since it's so second-nature by now. Fwiw I don't think ñ is any more important than the other accents, even in Spanish. Unless we're talking about año vs ano. That might be why it has a dedicated key.
  - Smar 2y ago
    On Linux, I've set up a compose key so I csn press compose key, ~ and A to get Ã.
- esd_g0d 2y ago
  > It was always odd to me that é was out of sequence Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is the only one of those that is found in French, which may have been supported earlier than Spanish. I'd look at ç, è, à for further evidence.
criddell 2y ago
I wonder why they made this work only on the numpad? Are these sequences available on laptop keyboards or some of the smaller keyboards that have no numpad? I’m working on a Lenovo Trackpoint II keyboard and alt-0176 should create the degrees sign but I can’t figure out how to do it.
- ale42 2y ago
  Some laptops have (had?) ways of entering numpad keystrokes using Fn+something (usually some letters), but I dind't see that in many years. I guess they used that because Alt+ normal numbers can be used as a hotkey in normal software (not sure what DOS software was using as keyboard shortcuts when they introduced this back in old BIOeSs...)
7bit 2y ago
ALT-3 ♥ Unfortunately, for some reason unbeknownst to me, this doesn't work any longer on Windows 10+11

120 points by ingve 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

> This means that whether the Alt+… value is taken mod 256 depends on what kind of control you are typing into. By default, the value is taken mod 256, and Alt+9731 gives you a heart. But if you happen to be using a RichEdit control, then the Alt+… value is taken mod 65536, and Alt+9731 gives you a snowman. And that is why some people hate Windows with so much passion. Not that other OSes don't have their peculiarities of course...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

jmclnx 2y ago

[flagged]

ttrrooppeerr 2y ago

> For example, you could enter ñ by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. To this day, this remains the best way to insert the character, I have tried the PowerToys Quick Accent [1] but I had so many missed characters when typing fast. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-accent https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/quick-ac...

Frieren 2y ago
> this remains the best way to insert the character The best way is to use a Spanish-layout keyboard. Otherwise, Alt is a useful hack.
Sharlin 2y ago
On many Euro keyboards it's just ~n, as ~ is a dead (modifier) key. But on Windows I do miss the way on macOS and iOS you get access to variants of a basic letter by pressing and holding the respective key.
robertoandred 2y ago
I prefer holding n and then pressing 1.
hnbad 2y ago
I use WinCompose, which is a Windows implementation of an XCompose style compose key. It comes with a number of composition sequences but you can also add your own. I have mapped it to the "menu" key which I never use so "ñ" is <Menu>,<~>,<n> or <Menu>,<n>,<~> (both work by default). For acute/grave accents I have a dead acute/grave key on my keyboard and because it's a German layout I already have the umlauts as separate keys. For "ë" and such I can compose the letter with <"> to get the diacritic version.

theonealtair 2y ago

I learned about the Alt characters a long time ago when I wanted to type “Pokémon” in the gamefaqs message boards. I never knew until now why higher numbers didn’t do anything different.

Workaccount2 2y ago

TIL that the reason these alt+ sequences never worked for me is because you have to use the number pad...

rep_lodsb 2y ago
Fun fact: On a DOS PC, typing these codes was possible even on a keyboard without a number pad, by using the cursor keys instead. This works because those keys produce the same scan codes (with the only difference being either the presence or absence of some prefix byte, depending on the NumLock state). 0 = Ins, 1 = End, 2 = Down, 3 = PgDn, 4 = Left, 6 = Right, 7 = Home, 8 = Up, 9 = PgUp (and by exploiting the mod 256 parsing, it should always be possible to find a code that doesn't contain the digit 5) Don't know if Windows emulates this, probably not. I wouldn't be surprised though if some part of the Windows keyboard driver translates the (different) scancodes sent by an USB keyboard into the legacy ones, just like the Alt+number handling does expect codepage 437 when there is no leading zero :) Some might say that this kind of "cruft" is what makes Windows a horrible OS - but IMHO it's really cool to find such backwards compatibility, and sad when it goes away for no good reason, to be replaced with entirely new cruft that logs everything you do on your "Personal" Computer and sends it to some cloud service...
novagameco 2y ago
Some laptops will map 789uiojkl to the keypad with fn

Aardwolf 2y ago

It would be great to make this feature relevant again but use decimal unicode codes, and have it work in linux too this way; it can be really useful now and then (as an alternative to looking up the unicode character on the internet and copypasting it) I remember using this back in the day for ALT+0160 to type non breaking space, which could do funny things in forums and chat programs like MSN and ICQ

Tblue468 2y ago
> It would be great to make this feature relevant again but use decimal unicode codes, and have it work in linux too this way [...] IBus[1] can (apparently) do that! [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IBus#Unicode_input https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IBus#Unicode_input
_flux 2y ago
I think urxvt has this feature, but it's also available via the Universal Input Method System in many widget sets and it is supported by both Gtk and Qt (might need some additional packages to be installed/setup). So I can just type the symbol in hexadecimal with Ctrl+Shift+U 2 6 0 3 Enter to enter . I used to remember the unicode symbol for long dash—but now that I use EUR keymap I don't need to, and I've forgotten it :). edit: oh crud, HN filters snowmans :(.
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  Just enable the compose key and forget all about having to memorize numbers. Just tap [compose][-][-][-] for —, and [compose][-][-][.] for –.
  - kps 2y ago
    Compose is nicely user-extensible (~/.XCompose) for those with domain-specific needs; it's one of the few workstation-era holdovers that DesktopLinux™ hasn't ruined yet.
  - Lammy 2y ago
    This is by far the most intuitive way to me. I rely on it even on Windows thanks to WinCompose instead of trying to memorize these alt-codes. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mirror/libX11/master/nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mirror/libX11/master/nls/e... http://wincompose.info/ http://wincompose.info/

wojtczyk 2y ago

My first keyboard on a 286 didn't have: alt+039:' alt+060:< alt+062:> They are still burned in my memory.

K7PJP 2y ago

Ah, is this one of the reasons Windows users are so attached to full-sized keyboards with numpads? In any discussion of TKL-or-smaller keyboards, there’s a cohort of people baffled at how any keyboard without a numpad could be fit for purpose. I take it this Windows feature is among the reasons why.

TylerE 2y ago
My biggest beef with TKL is not having a full sized, edge places enter key to thwack.
- snvzz 2y ago
  You're not alone on that. I use a topre-switched TKL in the office and find myself uselessly hitting the corner of the keyboard every so often.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Same. When my mostly beloved Microsoft Natural got too mushy and wobbly to tolerate anymore, I replaced it with a TKL which I tolerate but don't love. If I had it to do over again I'd get a full sized. For my home rig I'm running a kbdfans odin which is a non-standard layout that gives you 99% of a full size layout but in a size only about 2.5 keys wider than a typical tkl. (Example: https://kbdfans.com/cdn/shop/products/9_08accc65-e9f0-4455-a2eb-6e52bf6dc578_720x.jpg?v=1678267523 https://kbdfans.com/cdn/shop/products/9_08accc65-e9f0-4455-a...)
    - snvzz 2y ago
      Realforce R3HC13[0] is what I have. They have variants that are full-sized, which is what I'll get for home soon. Probably a 45g one rather than 30g, so that I can test the difference. 0. https://www.realforce.co.jp/products/R3HC13/ https://www.realforce.co.jp/products/R3HC13/
      - TylerE 2y ago

novagameco 2y ago

alt-255 alt-255 alt-30 alt-30 alt-255 alt-30 new friends can't triforce

Sabinus 2y ago
What a blast from the past. This was my introduction to alt codes.

UI_at_80x24 2y ago

Back in my BBS days I would use ALT+255 to create a <null> blank character. Windows couldn't display it, but the FTP programs I used could. That made it fun/easy to "hide" an FTP server dump location on a windows server. The windows admin could see that the drive was filling up but not which directory was the cause. Linux could see it. And so could my FTP client. (Enter fond memories of using FXP here too) For multiple layers of chaos I might create multiple "blank" directories but only store the 'real' files multiple layers deep. For added "legitimacy" I might include the contents of \system or \print or something. I can't remember exactly.

TimTheTinker 2y ago
We used the Alt+255 trick in my high school computer lab (windows 3.1) to hide games like Doom and Descent. It worked great because for some reason, if I recall correctly, the `dir /s` command would not traverse into directories with that name, so recursive directory searches for "DOOM.EXE" would turn up nothing. Also, folders with that name wouldn't appear in Windows. To break out of the managed environment, someone figured out they could hit Ctrl+Break at the text-mode login screen - this would drop you to a DOS prompt. But the lab admin got wise to that and blocked that key combination. I figured out a workaround: Alt+3. It would send an ASCII code that the input would interpret identically to Ctrl+Break, and we were back in business :-)
- rep_lodsb 2y ago
  I'm somewhat skeptical about folders not appearing, the Alt+255 character is just a non-breaking space, and should display as such: the name will appear to be blank, but with a clickable folder icon. However, I can confirm that DIR /S doesn't enter directories starting with that character - TIL! From reading the source code[1], this happens because it requires the name to be alphabetically below something called the "temp name", which is initialized to start with this character. What the code seems to be doing is selection sort, finding the first (alphabetically lowest) subdirectory that hasn't been entered yet, by reading the entire directory each time and comparing all the names. Not very efficient, but excusable if it saved some memory. [1] https://github.com/Hengle/ms_dos_6_0_source_code/blob/master/ms_dos_6_0_source_code/dos-6.0/cmd/command/dir.asm#L1102 https://github.com/Hengle/ms_dos_6_0_source_code/blob/master... -- temp name init is at line 1767

TuringNYC 2y ago

When we were learning typing in high school, some of the geekier kids were using alt-224, etc to selectively replace some English chars with Greek ones. The not-so-techy teacher were scratching her head on how we were typing in Greek.

felideon 2y ago

Fond memories of having a handy cheatsheet printed out for doing homework and chatting on MSN Messenger, until of course I memorized them (or maybe I printed it for the benefit of others). It was always odd to me that é was out of sequence: Alt+160 => á Alt+130 => é Alt+161 => í Alt+162 => ó Alt+163 => ú Alt+164 => ñ Alt+165 => Ñ Most people with US keyboards had no idea how to type ñ/Ñ, the most important out of the bunch.

hombre_fatal 2y ago
It's even better on macOS. opt-n <char> for ñõã mark opt-e <char> for éíóú mark opt-i <char> for îûôê mark opt-u <char> for üöïë mark Add a shift to capitalize it. I have an AutoHotkey script to get this on Windows since it's so second-nature by now. Fwiw I don't think ñ is any more important than the other accents, even in Spanish. Unless we're talking about año vs ano. That might be why it has a dedicated key.
- Smar 2y ago
  On Linux, I've set up a compose key so I csn press compose key, ~ and A to get Ã.
esd_g0d 2y ago
> It was always odd to me that é was out of sequence Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is the only one of those that is found in French, which may have been supported earlier than Spanish. I'd look at ç, è, à for further evidence.

criddell 2y ago

I wonder why they made this work only on the numpad? Are these sequences available on laptop keyboards or some of the smaller keyboards that have no numpad? I’m working on a Lenovo Trackpoint II keyboard and alt-0176 should create the degrees sign but I can’t figure out how to do it.

ale42 2y ago
Some laptops have (had?) ways of entering numpad keystrokes using Fn+something (usually some letters), but I dind't see that in many years. I guess they used that because Alt+ normal numbers can be used as a hotkey in normal software (not sure what DOS software was using as keyboard shortcuts when they introduced this back in old BIOeSs...)

7bit 2y ago

ALT-3 ♥ Unfortunately, for some reason unbeknownst to me, this doesn't work any longer on Windows 10+11