Alt codes, the new dimension to your keyboard

Introduction

For people who knows a bit about me on Twitter, you have seen me posted my advances on Duolingo. If you don’t know what Duolingo is, it a platform for you to learn new languages.

Why am I talking about Duolingo, you may ask ? Well it because this how I encountered the "Alt codes". Indeed, as a French guy, when I’am learning English, I have no problem, since the English characters can be considered as a subset of the French characters (the character with accents are present in French but not in English, for example), and because I am using a azerty keyboard. But I want to learn other languages too, like Spanish (the other language that I’m currently learning), with its É or í, for example. And in Spanish, there are characters than the French language do not have, nor the azerty keyboard. So I’ve went on a journey on the Internet which led me to the "Alt codes".

Alt codes

In this section, you will find all the characters I’ve been able to display using my keyboard on Windows 10. If you have some different on your machine, do not hesitate to add a comment to this post, it will help to keep this list up to date 😉

How do I do a Alt character ?

First before enumerating all the Alt codes, let’s see what to do to write an Alt character!

If you have a numeric keypad on Windows, as I do, you must first press the Alt key, and while pressing it type the number of the Alt character you want. Give it a try, open a text editor or whatever you want, and press Alt, type on the number 3 from your numeric keypad, and stop pressing on the Alt button. You should have a ♥ displayed! Pretty cool, isn’t it ?

If you don’t have one, or you have a different Operating System, I encourage you to follow this link. The author of this post explains the different methods pretty well.

Alt Codes

Here are all the code I’ve managed to get on my computer, which is, for those who would be curious about it, a Acer Predator running on Windows 10 up to date.

For information, there are 256 Alt Codes, but if you try Alt + 257 to get ☺, like with Alt + 1. Indeed, the Alt codes loop after 255, and you restart with Alt + 0 being the same character as Alt + 256, Alt + 1 being the same character as Alt + 257, and so on.

To make it easier to find some specific characters, I’ve regrouped them in categories..

Roman letters

Accentuated characters

Other letters

Sexes

Music

Cards

Smiley

Arrows

Numbers

Maths symbols

Currency

Punctuation

Accents

Others

Conclusion

Even if my first use is for foreign languages, there is so much diversity in those characters that there are many other purpose that I’ll definitively use some others too 😄

I hope this will be useful to you too! If you have any suggestion to add some other categories, please give them in the comment, and until next post, have fun learning and growing.