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June 22, 2007

tips

Access Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer without the fuss

Posted Jun. 22, ’07, 8:24 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips

keyboardviewer.pngOS X has some exceptionally useful tools built in. Two that I find myself using on a frequent basis are the Character Palette and the Keyboard Viewer (née KeyCaps in OS 9). The problem is to get at either of these requires the navigation of a labyrinthine set of steps that would make recovering the Ark of the Covenant look easy. You have to go to the International preference pane, select Input Menu, and choose to display the palette and viewer. Then you have to summon them from the input menu. In many apps you can get to the Character Palette under Edit -> Special Characters (command-option-t), but it doesn’t work universally, and there’s no similar way of getting to the keyboard viewer.

And so my colleague Rob “the Hintmeister” Griffiths comes to my rescue once again. Over at the Mac OS X Hints blog, he shows you how to add the Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer to your Dock, or your Finder sidebar or toolbar. Navigate yourself to /System/Library/Components/, where you’ll find KeyboardViewer.component and CharacterPalette.component. Choose “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu on either of these and then open up Contents/SharedSupport; you’ll see CharPaletteServer.app and KeyboardViewerServer.app respectively. Drag these apps to your Dock, sidebar, or toolbar and you’re all set.

I took it a step further and created new file pointers in my application launcher of choice, Butler, so now I can just start typing “KeyboardViewer” or “CharacterPalette” to bring them up, saving me valuable time and mouse clicks that I could be using for other things. Like surfing for iPhone news.


3 Comments

David Wishart said:

I access the character palette from the finder menu.

In the international system preference, choose the "Input Menu" pane, and check "Show input menu in menu bar"

Click the flag in the menu bar and select 'Show character palette"

June 22, 2007 10:16 AM
RambOrc said:

I don't really see the point of this "tip" given that all you need to do is go to System Preferences/International and check the box "show input menu in menu bar" to have a much smaller shortcut to both apps in one from a less cluttered place (the menu bar at the top of the screen).

June 22, 2007 11:09 AM
Erik said:

The point is that some people have so many icons in their menu bar that it simply doesn't allow enough space for all the menu items as well as all the icons.

This trick allows them to relocate these specific icons, so that they don't have to sacrifice access to this functionality.

June 22, 2007 2:07 PM

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