ok, this one has been bothering me for a while now. Why dont we have a cents sign key on our keyboards? I know we can simply do $.99, but thats not the point. It seems like it should be there. I mean what is another key.... it is the other part of our currency here in the US

I think about random shit way too much....

you know, that bothered me last year sometime in May, when I was typing a report regarding the statistics of money spent on dieting pills. let me tell you, it was pretty annoying to go to the dollar sign (while pressing shift), go to the period, and then type the number - over 100 times. At that moment, the same thought occured to me - damn, that key would make life so much easier!

Cheers,
Jerry

¢?
On my keyboard (Dutch, no-deadkeys-map) , it's under AltGr-c.

Or : E=MC²

Yes, ¢...But, that should be one key, not a combo or cut and paste... i was just too lazy to do it in the first place

Thanx for sharing that with us, scott_R.

too bad it wasn't on my keyboard when i typed that report last year

Depending on your OS/hardware, you might be able to enter oddball characters in relatively easy. I mean relatively, because it's more of a hassle than a single key press, but generally easier than hunting through a menu of rarely used symbols only to use the same one over and over. The trick is to know the "code" for the symbol, which means hunting once for it in your keyboard/character map. (This can be a problem sometimes, as different OS's and setups may have different character/keyboard mappings...don't expect it to work the same on every computer you touch.)

Once you find it, write it down for future use. Then, hope your favorite editor/OS/gui/hardware supports this "cheat". If it does, cool, if it doesn't, there's probably a way to enable it, but I'm not about to hop into that can of worms right now.

All that above isn't meant to make it sound hard to do, just that it might not seem to work at first blush, or might print a character different than the one you expect. The actual process is simple.

Hold down <alt>, type in the appropriate code using the number pad on your right (usually three or four numbers, sometimes including a-f as numbers), then release <alt>. With any luck, you get the character you intended.

From then on, with your cheat sheet of favorite characters, you can repeat as necessary, with far less effort than most other options. I know it sounds a little complicated, but it's really a piece of cake once you do it, and if you type much, you'll find yourself using the trick a lot. It's especially handy if you correspond with someone in another country.

Maybe you can use this next time

hmm.... I'll think about it ...

oh, and thanx for that "ALT process", scott_R. Knowing me, I'll probably make good use of it

$ = Shift-4
¢ = AltGr-c

Both are two-stroke combinations.
Fine with me.
Or do you feel the ¢ is more important than the $?
If so , I'd like to hear(read) your reasoning for that.

Or did you mean , all those characters deserve their own key?
Err.... ever imagined what space your keyboard woud occupy in that case?

Just going with my keymap:
¬¹²³¼½¾£{}\瀶ß|«»¢µ·(The AltGr-combinations alone)
That's 21 extra keys.....
That's a 20% more space to add....
Physical space , that is.

Think of what replacing the Shift-combos will do to that space....
Space substracted from my precious desk-surface....

oh the fractions are fun, i never knew. i am going to try to use the fractions in at least ½ of my posts.

Think yourself lucky - the US $ appears on enery keyboard layout throughout the world, as it's used extensively in scripting, programming, etc. Most global currencies, such as the yen, have no currency mapping whatsoever outside their local zone. The euro doesn't even have a proper keyboard mapping at all - it's available in a small amount of fonts as a kind of plug on to the '4' key!

Dave

The only explanation I can think of for why it is not there is that it's not part of ASCII. Seems like a gross oversight to me, but maybe in choosing what went into the 128 ASCII characters, it was deemed redundant.

hmm, may be. but it's only one stupid key!? then again, if they'll come out with that button, everyone will want all the others, and that would take up a considerable amount of space, like Megamieuwsel said before.

Regards,
Jerry

Not entirely :
While this is true with the default iso8859-1 characterset , one can have it available when loading the iso8859-15 characterset instead.
You need a proper keymap for it , though , that also enables the AltGr-function(not default).
In Linux , this can be somewhat of a hassle as it involves some editing of config-files.