Mr.Amiga500
Experienced Member
Well, the ALT key gets a good workout in Windows...
One of the more useful applications is to type special characters not on the keyboard (ALT + numeric keyboard ASCII value)
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I've always hated that. It's totally stupid to force users to memorize an ASCII list just to type special characters. There's the Character Map program (or whatever it's called), but the window doesn't stay on top and you can't redirect output to where you're typing - just copy and paste. It's totally inefficient when you're typing a letter full of accents.
The Amiga has a nice way of doing it. Pressing Alt switches the keyboard keys to the alternate characters. For accented letters, you press the accent key then the letter the accent goes on. Example: for é, you just press Alt-F for the accent, then e. If you want á, you do Alt-F then a. If you can't remember which key is the special character you want, you just bring up the Keyshow graphical keyboard.
I think many people have stopped adding accents to words like cliché and résumé just because it's such a pain in the ass to do it in most operating systems.