6 ms·
It's a shame. The solution is in the charset, but tools never developed to use it so we don't use it. But I'd wager that if tools had historically supported t
by 3JPLW 13y ago
It's a shame. The solution is in the charset, but tools never developed to use it so we don't use it. But I'd wager that if tools had historically supported them, then the situation would be no different than it is with tab.
There are representational glyphs for tab, return, and others (⇥, ↵), and editors can show them in 'show whitespace' modes. There could be representational glyphs for these control characters, too. I'm not sure about the history of these symbols, but I imagine they were initially on keyboards. But if these control characters were on keyboards and had a representation in text then they'd be just as useless as the tab character is today.
Precisely what makes them valuable is their difficulty to type or display.
- Pxtl 13y ago> Precisely what makes them valuable is their difficulty to type. Again, if they'd caught on you'd imagine there would be some eventual convention in text-editors for what keybind would be used to enter them. Too bad the AltGr key (intended for entering rarely-used glyphs) doesn't appear on pure-English keyboards.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wiredfool 13y agoI'd bet that they were on the eleventyzillion key IBM terminal keyboards.
- markeganfuller 13y agoI'm looking at my English keyboard and it has Alt Gr...
- Crito 13y agoQwerty keyboards intended specifically for the US market (opposed to the UK for instance) frequently do not have AltGr keys. The thinkpad I'm using right now doesn't have one, and the Das Professional I have next to me doesn't have it either. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if I've ever owned a keyboard with an AltGr key.. To get around this, I have taken to using xmodmap to turn my right alt key into altgr.
- markeganfuller 13y agoI'm surprised to learn that the Das doesn't have it.
- bruceboughton 13y agoHow would you tell…?
- Crito 13y agoHa. Only the Das Ultimate doesn't have printed keys. I got the Professional which has printed keys (http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-professional/ http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-professional/). I'm not that show-offy about touch-typing. ;)
- StavrosK 13y agoTip: I've got both, the blank one isn't worth the hassle. I can type fine on it, except when I need to find & or something. Then I have to press all the numeric keys to figure it out.
- hnal943 13y agoLiving in the US, I've never heard of an AltGr key until this discussion.
- louthy 13y agoLiving in the UK, I've always seen it and for some reason never questioned what the Gr meant!
- Nilzor 13y agoso.. what does it mean?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- flux_w42 13y agoAccording to wikipedia: The meaning of the key's abbreviation is not explicitly given in many IBM PC compatible technical reference manuals. However, IBM states that AltGr is an abbreviation for alternate graphic, and Sun keyboards label the key as Alt Graph. Apparently, AltGr was originally introduced as a means to produce box-drawing characters, also known as pseudographics, in text user interfaces. These characters are, however, much less useful in graphical user interfaces, and rather than alternate graphic the key is today used to produce alternate graphemes.
- spoiler 13y agoI'm from Croatia, and we have the AltGr key. However, I discovered that Alt + Control = AltGr when I needed to use it at work[1], so it's simply a shortcut, I think. [1]: We have (I recently switched to an UK keyboard, because it suits me better) keyboards at work, because the Croatian (all slavic languages, to be honest) is horrendously counterproductive for programming. Google the layout, and you'll realise why. An example: You need to press AltGr+B for `{` (if I remember correctly).
- chinpokomon 13y ago
- flux_w42 13y agoHere in Belgium we have to AltGr-the hell out of our keyboard during development. These characters can only be entered using the AltGr key on a Belgian Azerty keyboard (be-latin1): '|' '@' '#' '^' '{' '}' '[' ']' '\' and '~' Its not realy a problem, as long as you're used to it :-)
- Crito 13y agoOf those, |, @, #, ^, {, } and ~ are all keys that you need shift for on US Qwerty keyboards, so I imagine that the typing experience for those is relatively comparable.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoIF those characters are actually displayed on the corresponding keys. If it's like the # on the Mac keyboard - not displayed anywhere - it's a right pain to learn in the first place without any visual cues.
- egypturnash 13y agoI'm looking at a couple Macs sitting around the house and they all have a pretty obvious # right above the 3. Perhaps you mean some other key? (I do really miss the days when Mac keyboards had the weird symbol they use for "alt" in menus on the key.)
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoWhich keyboard do you have? The standard aluminium full size one doesn't label it, at least in the uk
- spolster 13y agoOn US Mac keyboards, # is Shift-3. On UK Mac keyboards Shift-3 is the Pound (Sterling) sign. # becomes Alt-3 and is unlabelled on the keyboard. In the past, I've bought US Mac keyboards just for the #, or switched the keyboard layout in software to US.
- jarrett 13y ago> Precisely what makes them valuable is their difficulty to type or display. Exactly. A naive[1] character-delimited format is only robust when its delimiter isn't on the keyboard. Which means it's practical to read and write only in specialized applications, not in a text editor. Which sort of defeats the point of a character-delimited format anyway. If your use cases are constrained to specialized applications, you may as well just use JSON or something similar, instead of a character-delimited format. (I'm imagining a world where we get to pick our ideal formats, not one where Excel happens to have an almost-working CSV implementation.) [1] By "naive" I mean one where the format specification describes record and line characters only. Thus the format has no escaping system.
- stingraycharles 13y agoIs this a problem that's solved with a "movement" ? I'm willing to contribute parsers and perhaps a text editor plugin if other people are willing to chip in. But indeed, this is a problem that's solvable by making the tools support it. Since most of the tools are OSS, this is mostly solvable.
- 3JPLW 13y agoYou're missing my point. If this were a "solved problem," then it would be no better than the status quo with TSV. Tabs are a similar kind of control character, except they can be typed and displayed easily. And TSV files are a mess because tabs end up in the fields themselves. It's a catch-22. (I'm exaggerating; this would still be somewhat better since there will never be a big key on your keyboard dedicated to these ASCII values.)
- jrochkind1 13y ago> but I imagine they were initially on keyboards I wouldn't be surprised if the last time they were on a keyboard, it was a teletype keyboard or a keyboard that punched cards! Although, actually, were they just typed using the control key from the start?
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoIf there isn't a glyph, you can always use text representation for control codes. Here's an example using Notepad++. http://i60.tinypic.com/nps3d1.png http://i60.tinypic.com/nps3d1.png