special_characters

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special_characters.ahk

Provides hotstrings to easily type special characters.

My favorite script! Makes life so much easier.

Finnish alphabet (ä, Ä, ö, Ö)

These four hotstrings are the most important for me:

• When I type h', the characters get replaced with ä.
• When I type H', the characters get replaced with Ä.
• When I type h;, the characters get replaced with ö.
• When I type H;, the characters get replaced with Ö.

Before I created this script, I was constantly toggling the input language between US English and Finnish with Win + Space. I switched to Finnish when I was writing Finnish (my native language) and otherwise kept US English active.

But man, it was so annoying to forget many times a day which one is the currently active input language. It was also unergonomic to constantly toggle between the two.

No more! Now I can keep US English active all the time while still being able to write Finnish comfortably.

I have tried many different hotstrings for typing ä's and ö's, but the above hostrings seem to be the most ergonomic and comfortable for me. There are a few apps and situations where the hotstrings don't work reliably, but they work like 95% of the time, and that's enough for me.

Other special characters

Below are the next five hotstrings that I use the most. The "HTML entity" column is just for reference.

Type this	Get this	HTML entity	Comments
;b	•	•	Bullet; great for bullet lists
;nb		 	Non-breaking space
;nd	–	–	En dash
;ra	→	→	Right arrow
;x	×	×	Multiplication sign

And here are the rest of the hotstrings provided by the script. I use these only rarely, but they are nice to have around.

Type this	Get this	HTML entity	Comments
;ao	å	å	Lowercase "Swedish O"; used very rarely in Finnish
;Ao or ;AO	Å	Å	Uppercase "Swedish O"
;da	↓	↓	Down arrow
;la	←	←	Left arrow
;ua	↑	↑	Up arrow
;es	☆	☆	White/empty star
;fs	★	★	Black/full/filled star
;ae	≈	≈	Almost equal to / Approximately
;ne	≠	≠	Not equal to
;half	½	½	Half
;pm	±	±	Plus-minus
;copy	©	©	Copyright
;reg	®	®	Registered trademark
;tm	™	™	Trademark
;...	…	…	Horizontal ellipsis
;deg	°	°	Degree
;eur	€	€	Euro
;gbp	£	£	Pound
;md	—	—	Em dash
;mid	·	·	Middle dot
;sup0	⁰		Superscript 0
;sup1	¹	¹	Superscript 1
;sup2	²	²	Superscript 2
;sup3	³	³	Superscript 3
;sup4	⁴		Superscript 4
;sup5	⁵		Superscript 5
;sup6	⁶		Superscript 6
;sup7	⁷		Superscript 7
;sup8	⁸		Superscript 8
;sup9	⁹		Superscript 9
;dis	ಠ_ಠ		Look of disapproval
;lenny	( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)		Look ma, it's Lenny!
;shrug	¯\(ツ)/¯		Shrug

What about emojis?

Creating hotstrings for emojis would be very possible, but I haven't because I find the default emoji picker in Windows 10 good enough: press Win + . (period) or Win + ; and start typing an emoji's name.