Is there an easier way to open the character palette and keyboard viewer on OS X?

I couldn’t find any free solutions for your problem, but I did find this software: http://osx.iusethis.com/app/popcharx.

The problem with Mac OS X is that it doesn’t have as much open-source support as Windows and Linux. I’ve only had my MacBook Pro for five months and I’ve been learning to accept that since day one.

I wrote a couple of Applescripts and saved them as applications to do this for you.

You can get them here.

Just double click and they will open their respective applications. And you can put them in the dock or your applications folder or wherever.

And thanks for testing them Allie!

Thanks! That’s brilliant!

If you’re just trying to type letters with accents, then you can hold down option and type e, u, i, or n to get ´, ¨, ˆ, and ˜, respectively. After get the accent you want, then type the letter you want the accent to appear over. For example, pressing option-n and then just n yeilds: ñ.

@Anaphase That is a great suggestion. Once you learn those key combinations, you won’t need the special character palette ever again. I’ve taken the time to learn them myself.

There’s more special characters than just accents over letters. While those combos are useful, it doesn’t cover everything. That’s where it’s nice to get the keyboard viewer up. Or, for the really odd chars, the character palette to insert them manually.

@damien That’s why I included “If you’re just trying to type letters with accents” in my answer…

@Anaphase, Sorry, I should have addressed that to @nashish.. I was replying to his comment about never needing it again.

There are key combinations for characters other than the accented ones. All of the special characters have key combinations to create them.

@nashish But things like Japanese characters can’t be type with the keyboard, which is what I think the original question was hinting at.

Unless I misunderstood the question, in which case, yes, you can type almost all the special characters using option+(a key) or option+shift+(a key)