keyboard pain

This shows how ridiculous Microsoft's idea of "shortcuts" for
entering basic keystrokes is:

    http://www.nouilles.info/keyboard_shortcuts.html

For example, a left double quote (”) is Alt+[ on a Mac but Alt+0147 one
Windows.  What is character 147?  It's not its Unicode number.  Its unicode
number is 8220 in decimal, 0x201C in hex.  It's its "Microsoft Windows Code
Page 1252" number. You have to memorize numeric codes, and not even proper
Unicode ones but just Microsoft proprietary ones.  And God help you if you
change your default encoding.

Or suppose you want to enter a lowercase a with a grave accent: à.  On a Mac,
you use two keys: Alt+`, followed by an a.  Very simple.  On Microsoft,
you have to use Alt+0224.  That's four keystrokes, not two.  Yet this time
it actually is the Unicode number, which is U+00E0 or 224 in decimal.  

So annoying.  Apparntly there is an "international keyboard" configuration 
for Microsoft that makes this easier, but I haven't found it yet.

--tom

• keyboard pain by Tom Christiansen
• Re: keyboard pain by Aristotle Pagaltzis
• Re: keyboard pain by Eric Brine
• Re: keyboard pain by Ricardo Signes
• Re: keyboard pain by Tom Christiansen