• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Foliovision

Main navigation

  • Weblog
    • FV Player
    • WordPress
    • Video of the Week
    • Case Studies
    • Business
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Meet the Team
    • We Support
    • Careers
    • Contact
    • Pricing
  • Products
  • Support
    • FV Player Docs
    • Pro Support
  • Login
  • Basket is empty
Affordable VAST/VPAID for Wordpress has arrived. Serve ads with your videos starting today!

How to Type Mac Keyboard Symbols into Forums and Web Pages

29 November 2023 / Alec Kinnear / Leave a Comment

Have you ever wondered how some members of StackOverflow and AskDifferent and/or other tech forums are able to write Mac keyboard symbols like ⌘ (command), ⌃ (control) and ⌥ (option) directly into their posts?

Here’s the long way explained from Kyle Cronin at StackOverflow:

Mac OS X provides a pane to insert special characters. You’ll find it under Edit -> Emoji and Symbols in any program that takes text input. The Command key symbol can be found by searching for it’s name “place of interest”. To insert the character, double click it.


If you’re really hardcore and are looking for a way to type the character by entering the Unicode hex code, this is possible:

  1. Go into System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Input Sources, click “+”, scroll to “others”, select “Unicode Hex Input” and click “Add”

  2. From the input source selector in the menu bar, select “Unicode Hex Input”

  3. To enter a Unicode character, hold down option and type the 4-digit hex code for the character and it will be inserted. In this case, it would be option+2``3``1``8.

This is way too much work when text expanders exist. On OS X/macOS, we have three main choices for text expanders at this point.

  • the original Typinator (one-time purchase €29.99, right now 33% off for Black Friday, sales come and go)
  • the copycat and now subscription TextExpander which phones home and keeps your expansions online, like it or not struck out for both subscription and privacy issues
  • the built-in macOS text expander in the Keyboard preference pane

As far as I know the built-in macOS text expander still does not offer import or export. Every expansion has to be created by hand. That’s way too much time for a serious writer, especially a tech writer. So Typinator it will be.

Unfortunately Ergonis does not offer an expansion set of Mac keyboard symbols. Dr Drang does: Dr Drang’s Mac keyboard symbol snippets. But Dr Drang’s set is for TextExpander. I tried to import the TextExpander .xml file no dice.

The only way to convert them easily is to install TextExpander, install Dr Drang’s set export them from TextExpander as a .csv file and then import that .csv file to Typinator. No way I want to install TextExpander with its near malware invasiveness.

Happily Dr Drang did leave an HTML table with the abbreviations and symbols on his web page:

To insert Type Key name
⌘ ;cmd Command
⌥ ;opt Option
⇧ ;shift Shift
⌃ ;ctl Control
⇥ ;tab Tab
⌫ ;bs Backspace
⌦ ;del Forward
Delete
⌅ ;enter Enter
↩ ;return Return
⎋ ;esc Escape
 ;apple Apple
← ;left Left Arrow
→ ;right Right Arrow
↑ ;up Up Arrow
↓ ;down Down Arrow
␣ ;space Space

I converted that HTML table to CSV and imported the CSV file from within Typinator. No dice again. The symbols were in the abbreviation column and the key name was in the expansion column!

Next I edited the CSV file to remove the key name and to put the abbreviation in front of the symbol. A quick export of the .csv from Numbers and then another import of that .csv from within Typinator. Bingo!

The set is now inside Typinator and works right.

Here are Dr Drang’s Mac keyboard symbol snippets to download for Typinator.

Dr Drang Mac Keyboard Shortcuts.tyset

I’m posting this here as it was a waste of time to have to convert Dr Drang’s Keyboard Symbols myself and I’m paying it forward. Of course one can add the symbols one by one oneself in either Typinator or the native macOS keyboard expansion panel. But we’re developers and we definitely don’t want to do by hand what can be done by a machine.

Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.

Categories: IT Tags: IT, macos

Related Posts

  1. screenshot of Keyboard Maestro shortcuts interface set up for Mailmate

    How to change the keyboard shortcuts on macOS

  2. FV Player's keyboard shortcuts

    FV Player’s New Features: Improved Keyboard Controls and Transcripts

  3. Prevent keyboard event when controlbar disabled

    Prevent keyboard event when controlbar disabled

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You can click here to Subscribe without commenting

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Business
  • Camera Reviews
  • Case Studies
  • Design
  • FV Player
  • Internet Marketing
  • IT
  • Life
  • SEO
  • Slovak
  • Video of the Week
  • WordPress

Footer

Our Plugins

  • FV WordPress Flowplayer
  • FV Thoughtful Comments
  • FV Simpler SEO
  • FV Antispam
  • FV Gravatar Cache
  • FV Testimonials

Free Tools

  • Pandoc Online
  • Article spinner
  • WordPress Password Finder
  • Delete LinkedIn Account
  • Responsive Design Calculator
Foliovision logo
All materials © 2025 Foliovision s.r.o. | Panská 12 - 81101 Bratislava - Slovakia | info@foliovision.com
  • This Site Uses Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Tel. ‭+421 2/5292 0086‬

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in .

Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie allow you to log in and download your software or post to forums.

We use the WordPress login cookie and the session cookie.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Support Cookies

Foliovision.com uses self-hosted Rocket.chat and self-hosted Freescout support desk to provide support for FV Player users. These cookies allow our visitors to chat with us and/or submit support tickets.

We are delighted to recommend self-hosted Rocket.chat and especially Freescout to other privacy-conscious independent publishers who would prefer to self-host support.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

3rd Party Cookies

This website uses Google Analytics and Statcounter to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

We reluctantly use Google Analytics as it helps us to test FV Player against popular Google Analytics features. Feel free to turn off these cookies if they make you feel uncomfortable.

Statcounter is an independent Irish stats service which we have been using since the beginning of recorded time, sixteen years ago.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!