4 ms·
> Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the
by mcv 1y ago
> Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all
Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward, or there was a separate key to move the same space back, so you could basically put any symbol above any letter. Kinda like how LaTeX does it.
- saithound 1y ago> or there was a separate key to move the same space back And that key was called Backspace.
- kps 1y ago> I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward This is normal for particular characters on non-English typewriters. Those were ‘dead keys’, ‘dead’ because the carriage didn't move. Equivalent keyboard layouts today also have dead keys. Modern dead keys can also be ‘better’, for instance, I'm told Brazil likes the dead ´ to produce á é í ó ú but also ç.
- zigzag312 1y agoDead keys unfortunately cannot be used for shortcuts. This has caused a lot of issues when I was using local kb layout. Especially problematic are programs that don't support remapping of shortcuts.