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Hello and welcome back to Friday Minis!
Today, we'll be talking about Alt Codes.
Now, today's video is gonna be slightly short because well, this is something that you're
gonna have to explore yourself, and decide how you want to use it.
But here's the idea - Well, there are a lot of characters you can actually input into
your computer, and because, since there are so many of them, thousands in fact, there
isn't actually room on the keyboard for every one of them.
To access some slightly-less-often-used characters, that, depending on your purposes you might
use a lot, you can actually hold down the Alternate (Alt) button, and key in the key
code, on a number pad.
Now you know I do a lot of sorting algorithms videos, so everytime I want to talk about
an O(n²) algorithm, it's not that easy to type the "²".
Of course, if you're using Microsoft Word you can just use the superscript function,
but if you're trying to type this into a plain text environment, that doesn't quite work.
What I do, is I hold down Alt, and type 0178.
That is actually the keycode for the square symbol, I believe 0179 would be for the cube
symbol.
They don't have any powers higher than that, so you're on your own after that!
But yea! There are many little gems like this scattered throughout the ASCII definitions.
If you want to find out what characters you can actually type using this technique, you
can actually hit your start button, and type "Character Map".
Once you open the Character Map tool, you can basically see all the characters that
are available. Of course, if you set this to Unicode you can see even more.
But the idea is, if you see a character that you are interested to type, just click on
it, and look at the bottom-right corner of that window.
It will tell you what keystroke, alt + which numbers you can actually key in, to get this
character displayed onscreen.
Now, if you are a student doing a lot of math, you will probably find this useful to key
in things like powers, knowing how to type the ½ symbol is pretty useful as well in
a lot of cases.
So yea! Explore the character map, see what characters you commonly use that you can just
memorize the keystroke for, and hopefully this speeds up things for you a little!
Well, that's all there is for this episode of Friday Minis!
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