Daniel Hruska Typing emojis on iOS is easy, just add the Emoji keyboard and it will immediately appear under the globe button as you type. Selected special characters can also be entered easily on iOS, but their range is limited. In contrast, OS X has hundreds of characters and dozens of alphabets available to discover.
Press the key combination ⌃⌘Space bar, or select a menu Edit > Special Characters, and a small emoji window will appear, just like you know from the Emoji keyboard on iOS. If you call up the emoticon menu in an application where text is written in a single line (for example, Messages or the address bar in Safari), a popover ("bubble") will appear and you can switch between individual tabs with tab (⇥), or ⇧⇥ to move in the opposite direction . In the recently inserted symbols tab, you can also choose from favorites if you have included a symbol in them in the past.
However, if you need to type a symbol other than an emoticon, press the button at the top right, which shows the Command (⌘) key symbol in the window. The complete character set available in OS X will open. As soon as you use the shortcut ⌃⌘Space, this window will appear instead of emoticons. Press the top right button again to display the emoticon menu.
Once you find the symbol you want, just double-click to insert it. The advantage of OS X in general is the ability to search everything quickly and accurately, starting with Spotlight and searching directly in applications. It is no different here. If you guess or know what the symbol is called in English, you can look it up. Alternatively, the symbol code in Unicode can be entered into the search, so for example to search for the Apple logo () search U+F8FF.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, each symbol can be added to favorites, which can then be found in the left sidebar. You might think that the character menu is not at all dizzying, but only some sets and alphabets are displayed by default. To select multiple sets and alphabets, click the gear button at the top left and select from the menu Edit list… The menu is so varied that you will see most of the alphabets for the first time in your life
Everyone will surely find something for themselves. Mathematicians will use a set of mathematical symbols, language students will use the phonetic alphabet, musicians will use musical symbols, and it could go on. For example, I most often insert Apple keyboard symbols and emoticons. During the writing of my bachelor's and master's theses, I again used several mathematical and technical symbols. So don't forget the shortcut ⌃⌘Spacebar, which is easy to remember, because a similar shortcut ⌘Spacebar is used to launch Spotlight.
Good tip. Thanks Daniel.