Get In Character

Input Sources

Have you noticed a national flag on the menu bar? You may even have wished it wasn’t there. Either way, your Mac supports multiple keyboard layouts associated with various countries and/or languages. When you have more than one layout set up and the Input menu is visible, the flag or icon of the active one appears on the menu bar.

In System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources, you can add keyboard layouts from some 200 choices. You can also see a preview of each layout, including the hidden characters revealed by pressing Shift and/or Option.

Finally, if you frequently switch to and from an input source associated with your current region (as set in System Preferences > Language & Region), you can choose to press Caps Lock to quickly make the switch. With this feature active, you must long press Caps Lock to use it in the normal fashion — typing in all uppercase.

Keyboard Viewer

Besides the small preview offered in Input Source preferences, there is another Keyboard Viewer available and with several more options. You can reveal it via the Input menu.

This keyboard viewer is resizable (click and drag any corner) and highlights each keypress as you do it. For example, hold Option and you’ll see various symbols and accents available. The further highlighted ones, when typed, create a placeholder under which you can type a letter to be accented. For example, press Option+E followed by u to get ú.

For additional options, click the Panel Options button in the top right. Also, if your Mac has a Touch Bar, check out this super cool feature: You can view the Touch Bar on screen and make it clickable by clicking the key to the left of F6. All of these features and more are represented as part of the Accessibility Keyboard.

Emoji & Symbols

You might be more familiar with typing emoji on an iPhone or iPad. These characters are also available on the Mac. In many applications, you’ll find Emoji & Symbols at the bottom of the Edit menu with keyboard shortcut Control+Command+Space, which reveals a panel called Character Viewer. Alternatively, you can access this via the Input menu.

There’s a treasure trove of content in the Character Viewer. You can discover a wide range of symbols with large previews, names, and Unicode identities, as well as related characters and/or font variations where applicable. You might even be surprised by what some characters are named. For example, you won’t find the Command key glyph (⌘) under that name because it’s actually called Place of Interest Sign.

You probably aren’t seeing all the available categories on the sidebar, though. You’ll find all available categories and thousands of characters among them in Unicode at the bottom.

When typing, you can place a character simply by double-clicking or by drag-and-drop. Like iOS, frequently used characters appear at the top. Unlike iOS, you can also specify favorite characters for even easier access.

You can use the button at the top right to toggle between a small panel or popover near the cursor and a large palette that you can resize—like most windows—by dragging any edge or corner. In palette mode, the button on the left side of the toolbar enables resizing characters in the list as well as customizing the categories shown on the sidebar.