Type secret characters and emojis on your Mac
Discover how to enter characters like accents, symbols and emojis that aren’t on the keyboard
• App credit: Apple Inc
In macOS you can bring up a handy viewer to help you find the right text symbols or characters
The Mac’s keyboard has 26 letters, ten numbers and a handful of symbols, but there are actually hundreds of characters, including accents, umlauts and more. There are sometimes eight or nine different variations of a single vowel, for example. There are hundreds of emoji characters and pictographs, too; currencies from around the world use special symbols; there are maths symbols, Greek letters, and many more. So how do you enter all of these characters? There are a couple of ways: the Emoji & Symbols picker and the floating Keyboard Viewer that is reactive to the keys you press. Here we show you how to use both.