First Post - What is macBlogger all about? Maximise your MacBook’s battery life
May 23

It was only after about a month of steady Mac usage that I first noticed the # symbol missing from the keyboard. I had to do a double and even triple take to confirm that the key doesn’t feature exclusively on any of the numerical keys. It’s a bit odd that it doesn’t feature as it is frequently used in web design to declare colour values.

To display the # symbol press the option/alt key and 3 at the same time.

Magic!

7 Responses to “Presenting the hash # symbol on Macs”

  1. Lar IRELAND Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3 Says:

    That still gets me, along with no Delete key (hit “fn” and backspace)

  2. Cormac Moylan IRELAND Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3 Says:

    Hi Lar,
    Yup, that got me as well. I couldn’t figure out how to delete things from the desktop or from within finder. I felt like a right tit.

  3. leon NETHERLANDS Mac OS X Camino 1.0.4 Says:

    My # is on Shift-3, and my delete is just a key. As I have a bluetooth mac keyboard I guess you’re talking about a MacBook:)

  4. Cormac IRELAND Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4 Says:

    Leon, on my iMac and Macbook I press option+3 to present #
    I’m sure you can configure your keyboard using a utility..

  5. leon NETHERLANDS Mac OS X Camino 1.0.4 Says:

    I just tried the Option-3 thing, and guess what? I get a pound sign (£). It seems the Dutch keyboard differs from an Irish one.

    What I think is nifty, by the way, is the keyboard palette.
    Click on the flag near the clock, select Show Keyboard (I’m translating my Dutch OS X so you might see something different) and press shift, or the option key and the keyboard “image” shows what characters are activated!

    Don’t have a flag? System Preferences->Country->Input menu tab, and check “Show input menu in menu bar” on the bottom.

  6. Cormac IRELAND Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.4 Says:

    Excellent stuff. Thanks for the tip Leon. I must write a blog post about it.
    You learn something new every day :)

    I don’t suppose you know how to make the apple key appear as text? Is that even possible?

  7. leon NETHERLANDS Mac OS X Camino 1.0.4 Says:

    It took a bit of searching, but the apple symbol seems to be Shift-Option-k (). I can’t really see it here as Camino probably does not use a font which has that character, at least not for a text area.
    I can enter and see it in Mail and Pages, so it does work:) For the Web an image might be the best bet.

Leave a Reply