Mac OS X keyboard character/symbol that falls last alphabetically?
Asked by
gcoghill (
139
)
January 14th, 2008
When browsing files in the Mac OS X Finder, I often add an underscore to a filename to pop it to the top of alphabetically sorted views, especially Column View – like so: _my folder.
I am trying to find the inverse symbol or character to drop an item to the bottom of a list. I even went through a process of adding all the odd characters one gets when using the option keys and such, but no luck. Does anyone know of a symbol or character that will make this happen?
Bonus points if it can be invoked via keyboard, instead of having to do so from the Character Palette.
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8 Answers
Try option-p (pi). It’s after z in my list. Option-z (omega) is even lower, naturally.
I’m still experimenting, but I’ve found that a backtick: ` comes before an underscore as does a carat ^. Interesting….
I found an article on Apple.com that talks about how the Finder sorts list items, but it only talks about how to make things first. I think bob may have found the best option, Ω
You’d likely be best using the Apple glyph as I believe it’s collation order is quite high (sorts lower): Option+Shift+K () – that is, of course, if you don’t mind having a bunch of Apple logos all over your directories.
You can check out the Unicode collation table but its a bit cryptic. However, since Mac OS is Unicode compliant it would likely sort with this collation so you could find that absolute lowest sort glyph if you really want to. :P
I tried looking at an ASCII table of characters (ASCII being the first 256 characters of the Unicode set) and there wasn’t much correlation between the numerical value of the ASCII character and how the Finder sorted it, but does sort after Ω.
Cool, lots of great options here, thanks! I am wondering if these are all cross-platform compatible? I would assume the Ω symbol would be best, and is a bit less visually obtrusive than the . It’s odd there’s nothing even less visually distracting than the Ω though. I was hoping for a punctuation-esque mark similar to the underscore.
I think back on OS 9 an asterisk dropped things to the bottom alphabetically, but not so anymore.
excellent work. exactly what i was looking for. yes i used to do this a lot on some older macs and i’d use space/s before a name to pop it to the top and option+8 ”•” (bullet) used to drop to the bottom. (pre OSX)
since OSX i’d been looking for a character that would drop to the bottom as now in OSX option+8 is sorted in the top of a list.
again, thanks, keep up the good work.
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