I’m writing a technical manual for my office. How can I type the Command symbol?
To do this the free way, start by opening System Preferences > Language & Text, and clicking Input Sources. Check the box for Keyboard & Character Viewer, and for “Show Input menu in menu bar.” Click your new menu bar icon and choose Show Character Viewer. Then in the dropdown for View, select Code Tables, click the Unicode tab, and scroll down to 00002300, titled Miscellaneous Technical. In the grid below, you’ll see the command symbol in row 2310, column 8. Double-click it to use it, or add it to the Favorites tab by using the gear button at the bottom-left.
The Character Viewer has the Command symbol you seek.
To throw some money at the problem instead, check out PopChar X ($39, ergonis.com), which makes it easy to type thousands of uncommon symbols like ⌘. Its window lets you search for symbols and click to insert them, plus create a favorites list. Unlike Apple’s solution, PopChar also shows you the keyboard shortcut, if one is available. The excellent user manual even explains the differences between Unicode and ASCII characters, and how to make the best use of symbols in your documents.
PopChar X is the easiest way to add special symbols to your documents.
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pbj
January 29, 2013 at 5:32pm
Lol....or you could just copy the symbol from the text above and paste where you need it.....⌘ ta-da!
Qaanol
February 17, 2011 at 1:15am
I know of two options that enable you to directly type the symbol you want. The simplest way is to configure the Text tab of the Language & Text pane of System Preferences to use automatic text replacement. Click the + icon at the bottom and add a rule to replace, for example “~~cmdkey” with “⌘”.
Another route you could go is to use a custom keyboard layout. You can make your own such layout with the free Ukelele program (version 2.1.4 is current at the time of this writing.)
My personal custom layout “Qboard” is available here: dl.dropbox.com/u/6765174/files/keyboards/Qboard.dmg (approximately 800KB). It provides the ability to directly type numerous characters such as ʇxǝʇ uʍop-ǝpᴉsdn, Greek, a large amount of mathematical notation, the symbols on Mac keyboards, and more.
In particular, with my layout, to type the Place Of Interest sign ⌘, which appears on the Command key, I type Opt-Shift-semicolon to enter Symbol mode, then I hit the Z key. Or succinctly, I type ⌥⇧; then z to get ⌘. Documentation included with Qboard shows all the modes that can be entered, what symbols are available in each, and how to type them, as well as how to install the layout.
