Type special characters

Discover shortcuts for adding accented letters, emoji, and symbols

There are several methods for typing special characters on a Mac. The traditional one is the Keyboard Viewer: turn it on in System Preferences’ Keyboard pane, then click the new menu bar icon and choose Show Keyboard Viewer. The on-screen keyboard this reveals reacts to your key presses, so holding one or more modifier keys shows what you can type by adding a regular key to the combo.

Other methods enable you to type accented characters more quickly, plus emoji and many more symbols not available in the Keyboard Viewer. They work in many apps, although you might discover exceptions — Adobe InDesign, for one, has its own panel for this. In other apps, if you find you can’t call upon the methods below, fall back on TextEdit: Type there, copy to the Clipboard, then paste where needed.