Backslash and other special characters when using a Mac

There are some characters that are not commonly used when writing regular text, but appear often when programming or using mathematics applications. Your hands should know where to find these characters.

On some keyboards various symbols are shown on the keys, making them somewhat easy to find.

Danish keyboard — A clever design where relevant information is displayed (in blue).

Other keyboards, on the other hand, look beautiful on your desk but require Google to use.

Swedish keyboard — A not so clever design where relevant information is not shown.

When using Windows or Linux, you will find most of the special characters by pressing the Alt Gr key. To get a curly left-bracket "{", press Alt Gr+7. For other characters, just look at your cleverly designed keyboard.

When using a Mac, you will sometimes need three fingers. Since looking at your keyboard will not help you, here we go:

keys	character
`option`+`shift`+`7`	\
`option`+`shift`+`8`	{
`option`+`shift`+`9`	}
`option`+`8`	[
`option`+`9`	]

If you use a non-American keyboard for a Mac and need a dollar-sign ($) (for programming, LaTeX, Excel, etc.), you may have a keyboard where a euro (€) is shown instead of a dollar. In that case:

keys	character
`option`+`4`	$

References and more ranting

More ranting can be found on Ash Searle's Blog I hate my Macbook Pro

Danish keyboard image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Danish.svg