The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish I'd started using Macs sooner.
It's pretty decent but the fact that I can't type an arbitrary unicode character has been a huge annoyance of mine since I switched from Windows/WSL to Mac.
They have shortcuts for Í, Î, and Ï but not for many commonly used characters like arrows
You can add the "Unicode Hex Input" keyboard layout, which lets you enter BMP characters by holding down Option and entering its code point in hex (similar to the hex entry on Windows). Expanding the Emoji & Symbols pane minitech mentioned also lets you browse by category (e.g. arrows), and you can customise the categories and add a full Unicode character picker (not limited to BMP like the Windows Character Map) there as well.
It's very easy¹ on MacOS to make yourself a custom layout with the characters you commonly use. Personally, I put arrows on ⌥⇧HJKL, vi-style.² (Doing so for Linux is a little more work, as xkb is more complicated and less capable.)
Aside from the solutions other people have mentioned, if you have often-used symbols, you can set up a text replacement in keyboard settings. For instance, I have :x: for the multiplication sign.
Control+Command+Space or Fn+E or Edit > Emoji & Symbols if you know the character’s name. It’s not very convenient for repeated use, but it gets the job done in a pinch.
Yeah it's not great. Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it. Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol
> Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it.
You can remap Fn/Globe directly to it if you want. It's also accessible from the Input menu bar item if you show that.
> Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol
Are you using the expanded Character Viewer window[0], or the default collapsed Emoji & Symbols pane[1]? Because the expanded Character Viewer lets you customise and reorder the categories[2] (though that doesn't affect search), including adding a full Unicode view[3]. And they both default to the search bar when opened (though the Character Viewer opens unfocused for some reason).
This specific key combination is not US keyboard specific.
I like how they managed to group characters that are formally similar by binding them to the same keys.
I appreciate that the designer of the layout clearly attempted to make some kind of mnemonic connection to the degree they could. Makes it easier to discover and remember the key-combos, even without a cheat sheet.
That's c-cedille here, because to write English fluently you need to be able to type French loan words like façade—but not quite so often as someone in Switzerland, probably (especially so in some parts of the country!) so I assume you've got it somewhere even more prominent on your keyboard.
Hyphen -: -
En Dash –: alt -
Em Dash —: alt shift -