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Comment by fainpul | Hacker News Reader

But how can I enter ’ (U+2019) on macOS (US layout) without going through some magic incantation? It’s impossible!

Option + ] will produce ‘, Option+Shift+] will produce ’. Similarly, “” can be produced with Option(+Shift)+[. Alternatively, Option+Shift+e will produce ´.

Ugh, that is such a bad arrangement of the four combos. It should obviously have been [ for left and ] for right (just as [ and ] are a pair), and Shift to turn single into double (just as Shift turns ' into ").

I’ve looked at the ASCII tables to try to figure out ¿what were they thinking? and suspect it has to do with option \ and | being « and » (and euro key for ` and ´ being one key’s base and shift).

See the ASCII table in the article, for example. I've considered the thing done wrong is the ] and { should've swapped. But then < and > and ( and ) beg me to differ.

Fortunately it's easy to on MacOS to make a custom keyboard layout like that.

Thanks. This is better than the alternatives that I was aware of.

Just enable automatic substitutions from the Edit menu? You can do this on a per-app basis.

MacOS, iPadOS, iOS on physical keyboards:

“ Option [

” Option {

‘ Option ]

’ Option }

… Option ;

- just -

– Option -

— Option _

• Option 8

> ’ Option }

But } needs shift. So this is Shift+Option+] which forces me to move my left hand off the base row. Not ideal.

you may be able to use the "ctrl (⌃) + cmd (⌘) + space" (character viewer) menu to select it? There may also be another shortcut for it.

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