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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were more symbols for other use cases, too. I honestly think the standardization of things in the 20th century actually prevented lots of innovations in language and alphabet. Nowadays, you can't even imagine adding or removing a letter to/from the alphabet. Heck, we can't even change the layout of the current alphabet on keyboards because QWERTY is just too much standardized. In fact, forget about alphabet; we can't even change the symbols on keyboards (who says I must only use `~!@#$%^&* ... on my keyboard?) Sure you can use unicode characters, but why haven't the special characters on keyboards changed at all since the 80s? The answer: standardization.

The evolution of languages, words, alphabets, and special characters helped shape the way we think about things, and since the 20th century, that hasn't changed that much.

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I totally agree with you. I like using symbols to shape the way I think, and I find using AutoHotKey to to expand typed strings works well for my workflow. Stuff like "qbeta", "qright", "qdegree" and "q@" become β, →, °, and my email. Very useful when I was in university.

These days, I use it to type stuff like (ﾟヮﾟ ) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and a black box symbol that HN won't let me type, but is eye catching for when you're scanning logs. Symbols like checkmark, ×, the thinking emoji, and the hourglass are useful when taking notes.

Lots can be found in the Windows 10 emoji finder (Win + Period), but AHK is more customizable. Also WinPeriod is juuuuust that much more friction and I find AHK fits into my flow better. This flow shapes the way I think.

You might find WinCompose useful. It gives you the compose key (⎄):

⎄oo → °

⎄<- → ←

⎄(12) → ⑫

⎄25 → ⅖

Of course, you can change the compose key rules.

I've been using AHK and snippets (in VS Code) __a lot__. TBH, this functionality should ship with the OS.

Instead of having separate AHK scripts, I have "one script to rule them all". When Windows launches, "my precious" loads all my scripts. Many of them I use in MS Word.

The one that gets me is that we have basically three variants of dash/hyphens. And double quotes have to do the duty of about four different use cases.

And the fact that there are two types of double quotation marks (“opening and closing”), but those are squashed into a third " symbol on the keyboard—blame the typewrite for that one.

Emojis would like a word with you ;)

In all seriousness, I think standardizing letters and symbols has done a lot to promote basic literacy. And there are plenty of language innovations like slang, emojis, kaomoji, new words like email, the prevalence of alternate text treatments like bolds, italics, underlines, strikethroughs, etc etc.

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