How to Type Special Characters: Dashes, Accents, Symbols

Almost every guide to typing special characters opens with a table of alt codes, and almost every one of them is giving advice that will not work on the machine most readers are using — and none of them work comfortably for single-handed keyboard use without Sticky Keys enabled.

Alt codes require a numeric keypad. Most laptops do not have one, and neither do compact keyboards, which together account for a large share of the computers in use — and if you write software, why code is so much denser in symbols than prose explains why this comes up far more often than it does for other people. The number row along the top of the keyboard does not substitute. So the standard advice fails at the first step for a great many people, and it fails silently — you hold Alt, you type the number, nothing happens, and there is no explanation.

This article covers the codes for people who can use them, the pickers that work on any keyboard, and the method that beats both for anything you type regularly. It is organized by how useful each approach actually is rather than by tradition.

The four methods, ranked

There are essentially four ways to get a character that is not printed on your keyboard, and they differ enormously in how well they work day to day.

Notice that the method taught first almost everywhere sits last, and it is the only one with a hard hardware requirement. That inversion is the single most useful thing in this article: if you have been failing to type symbols, it is probably because you were following advice written for a keyboard you do not own.

The picker: the answer that always works

Before any code table, learn one keyboard shortcut. It covers every character, requires no memorization, and works on any keyboard.

On Windows, press the Windows key and the period key together. A panel opens with tabs for emoji, symbols, and more — the symbols tab contains dashes, currency, math operators, punctuation and accented letters, and the panel is searchable by name. Microsoft documents this among its Windows keyboard tips.

On macOS, press Control, Command and Space together to open the Character Viewer, which is likewise searchable and covers the full range. Apple maintains a reference for its keyboard shortcuts more broadly.

Search for what you want by name rather than hunting visually. Typing "degree" or "em dash" or "euro" finds the character immediately, which is faster than scanning a grid and considerably faster than looking up a code.

The characters people actually look up

With the fallback established, here are the specific characters that account for the overwhelming majority of searches, with the direct shortcuts for each. Windows alt codes assume a numeric keypad.

The Mac accent pattern is worth understanding rather than memorizing row by row. Option plus a key sets an accent, then the letter you type receives it — so Option plus E followed by any vowel gives that vowel with an acute accent. Learn the four or five accent triggers and every accented letter follows.

The Windows codes have no such logic. Alt plus 0233 gives é for reasons rooted in a character encoding table rather than anything mnemonic, which is precisely why memorizing many of them is a poor use of effort. Their history is covered in the reference on alt codes.

Em dash, en dash, hyphen

The dash family generates more searches than anything else on this page, and the confusion is understandable because three similar-looking characters do three different jobs.

A hyphen joins words: well-known, twenty-one, e-mail. It is the key on your keyboard and needs no special handling.

An en dash — roughly the width of the letter n — spans ranges and connections: pages 10–14, Monday–Friday, the London–Paris route. It is the one most people never use, and in informal writing a hyphen is generally accepted in its place.

An em dash, the width of an m, is punctuation. It sets off a clause the way parentheses or a colon might, and it is the one worth learning a shortcut for because it appears constantly in ordinary prose. The typographic distinctions are catalogued in the reference on dashes.

• Most word processors convert two hyphens into an em dash automatically as you type — check before setting anything else up.
• In informal writing, a hyphen with spaces around it is widely accepted where an em dash would be correct.
• Never use typographic dashes in code, filenames, usernames or passwords — plain hyphens only.
• If you learn exactly one shortcut from this article, make it the em dash, because it is the one you will use most.

The method that beats all of them

For any character you type more than occasionally, both codes and pickers are the wrong tool, and the right one is text replacement.

You define a short trigger, and the system expands it into whatever you specify. Type a trigger like semicolon-em and an em dash appears. It works on any keyboard with no numeric keypad, it syncs across devices on most systems, and crucially you choose the trigger — so it is something you can actually remember rather than an arbitrary four-digit number.

The principle here is the same one that makes shortcuts and snippets valuable generally: reducing the keystrokes a task requires beats performing those keystrokes faster. The broader case, and the evidence behind it, is in what actually saves time at a keyboard.

What your software is already doing for you

Before configuring anything, it is worth knowing that a lot of this is handled automatically, and that some of what looks like a problem is actually a feature you did not know was switched on.

Word processors and many writing apps run substitutions as you type. Two hyphens become an em dash. Straight quotes become curly ones. A hyphen followed by a space at the start of a line becomes a bullet. Fractions like 1/2 sometimes become a single character. Ordinals get superscripted.

This is why people are sometimes surprised to find they have been producing em dashes for years without knowing how. It also explains the reverse frustration — text that keeps changing under you when you did not want it to, particularly in technical writing where a straight quote or a literal double hyphen was the point.

The practical advice is to leave these on for prose and know how to turn them off for anything technical. Code editors do not apply them at all, which is a deliberate design decision rather than an omission — a smart quote in source code is a syntax error, and one that is nearly invisible when you look at it.

Phones already solved this

Mobile keyboards handle special characters better than desktop keyboards do, and the mechanism is worth knowing both because it is genuinely useful and because it highlights what desktops got wrong.

The rule is simple: press and hold a related key. Almost every special character on a phone is hiding behind a long press on something logically connected to it, and no memorization or configuration is involved.

• Hold a vowel to get its accented variants — é, è, ê, ë and so on.
• Hold the zero on the number layout for the degree symbol.
• Hold the hyphen for en and em dashes.
• Hold the currency key for other currencies, and the period for ellipsis and other punctuation.
• Hold n for ñ, c for ç, and most other letters with common diacritics.

This is discoverable in a way the desktop equivalents are not — people find it by accident within days of owning a phone, whereas the Windows symbol panel goes unfound for years. The difference is that mobile designers were building a keyboard from scratch with no legacy layout to preserve, so they could put the extra characters where the related key already was.

Text replacement also works on phones and syncs across devices on most systems, which means the triggers you set up on a computer often appear on your phone automatically. That is the strongest argument for using replacements rather than memorizing platform-specific combinations.

Why alt codes need a numpad

This deserves explaining rather than merely stating, because the failure is so confusing when it happens.

The alt code mechanism reads digits specifically from the numeric keypad, which sends different key signals from the number row along the top. The two look identical on screen and are distinct to the operating system, which is why holding Alt and typing 0151 on the top row does nothing at all — no error, no character, no indication of why.

Some laptops provide a hidden numeric keypad overlaid on the letter keys, activated by a function key, and on those machines alt codes can be made to work with some effort. Many modern laptops omit this entirely. An external USB numeric keypad is inexpensive and solves it permanently for anyone who genuinely needs codes — the same accessory that matters for numeric data entry work, discussed in 10-key typing on the numeric keypad.

But for most people the honest conclusion is to stop trying. The picker and text replacement both work on every keyboard, and neither has a hardware prerequisite that half the readership cannot meet.

Accented letters and other languages

If you write regularly in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German or any language with diacritics, none of the above is the right answer. Codes and pickers are fine for the occasional accent and hopeless at volume.

The proper solution on Windows is the US International keyboard layout. It converts a few punctuation keys into dead keys, so typing an apostrophe followed by E produces é directly, in the flow of typing, with no interruption. macOS achieves the same through its Option-plus-accent pattern natively.

• Switch layouts rather than fighting the default if diacritics are routine for you.
• The trade-off on US International is that a literal apostrophe requires a following space, which takes a few days to adapt to.
• Phones handle this best of all: hold a vowel and the accented variants appear as alternates.
• Mobile long-press is the most discoverable version of this idea, and most people find it without instruction.

That last point is worth dwelling on. Phone keyboards solved special characters through long-press on a related key, which requires no memorization and no configuration. Desktop keyboards never adopted an equivalent, which is why this article needs to exist at all.

When not to use special characters

There is a category of places where typographic characters cause problems rather than solving them, and it is worth knowing before you start using them everywhere.

The curly quote problem is worth singling out because it produces one of the most confusing errors a beginner programmer encounters. Copying a code snippet from a document into an editor brings smart quotes with it, the compiler rejects a character that looks exactly like the one it wanted, and nothing about the error message explains why.

Why the keyboard lacks these keys

It is reasonable to ask why characters this common are not simply on the keyboard, and the answer is the same one that explains most keyboard oddities: the layout is a mechanical artifact that outlived its constraints.

Typewriters needed a physical typebar for every character, so keys were expensive in a way they no longer are. Characters that were rare, or that could be approximated, lost the argument — an em dash was typed as two hyphens, a degree symbol was often improvised, and accented letters were handled by backspacing and overtyping. The flip side is that several keys which did win a place have since lost their purpose entirely, covered in why your keyboard has keys nobody uses.

Those constraints vanished decades ago and the layout did not change, because by then hundreds of millions of people had learned it. The same inertia explains the arrangement of the letters themselves, which is examined alongside several related claims in the typing myths that refuse to die.

The practical consequence is a keyboard optimized for a technology nobody uses, with the gaps filled by pickers, codes and replacements bolted on afterwards. Knowing that is oddly useful, because it explains why none of the solutions feel elegant — they are all workarounds for a layout that was finalized before the problem existed.

The characters worth knowing by heart

A reasonable final question is how many of these are worth committing to memory at all, given that a picker covers everything.

The answer follows the same frequency logic that governs keyboard shortcuts generally. A shortcut that saves two seconds on something you do thirty times a day is worth learning; one that saves ten seconds on something you do twice a year is not, however satisfying it feels to know it. Most people writing ordinary English need exactly one character memorized, and it is the em dash.

Beyond that it depends entirely on what you write. Someone producing technical documentation needs the degree symbol and perhaps arrows. Someone writing in Spanish needs a layout change rather than individual characters. Someone in finance needs currency marks. A list built for a general audience is a list built for nobody in particular, which is why the week of noticing beats any table including the one above.

• Memorize what you use daily — for most people that is one or two characters.
• Set up replacements for the next tier, the ones you reach for weekly.
• Leave everything else to the picker, which is what it is for.
• Switch keyboard layouts rather than memorizing anything if you write in another language regularly.

What to set up today

If you do one thing after reading this, learn your operating system's picker shortcut — Windows key plus period, or Control plus Command plus Space. That single shortcut covers every character you will ever need and requires nothing else.

Then, over the next week, notice which characters you actually reach for, and add text replacements for those specific ones. For most people the list is short: an em dash, a degree symbol, and one or two accented letters or currency marks. Five minutes of setup removes the interruption permanently.

Leave alt codes alone unless you have a numeric keypad and a genuine reason. And if the underlying frustration is that typing itself feels slow rather than that symbols are hard to reach, the constraint is elsewhere — a practice routine that actually moves the number addresses that, and what counts as an average typing speed shows where the thresholds sit.