TUAW Tip: a shortcut to the Character Palette

Option-Command-T works in almost every application except Finder.

The keyboard system menu isn't required. The OS automatically adds a Special Characters... command to the Edit menu (with the keyboard equivalent Cmd-Option-T) which shows the character palette.

cmd-opt-t seems to be enabled by default (I'm using Leopard); on my Mac it works without changing preferences. I didn't know about this option. But does anyone know, if and how it is possible to change between the different keyboards by shortcut? Using the character palette and inserting letters by mouseclick is horrible. Better would be a possibility to insert foreign language characters by shortcut as I did it in MS Word before switching to the Mac. Any hints?

I use Opt+Cmd+T and to change keyboard layout from Polish to English (US) I use pre-defined shortcut Cmd+F15. It’s useful when you have to type proper quotation marks: “”. :)

And I don’t like the flag icon neither.

I have a question, where can I find a page or doc with the keystrokes to type some of those characters? For instance, how can I type a smiley face in an email? The only thing I know how to do is the damn  symbol!

Help please.

no, that's not easier to remember; unless i use it a lot (or unless i used it a lot 15 years ago when i memorized most of the individual character shortcuts) a keyboard shortcut can be hard to remember

since my brain is also stuffed with Latin names of plants, facts about the zoning code, etc., i find it easier to remember characteristics than names, and to do a search based on such; i use Quicksilver, sometimes Spotlight, group non-Apple apps into functional-area subfolders and add Spotlight comments to apps with useless names (like iRatchet); all so i can quickly find what i need without necessarily remembering its name or location

in the case of this tip i'm skipping the script and simply aliasing the hidden apps in to a place that Quicksilver indexes -- see http://www.macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=view&cid=65490 ... my MBP menu bar gets some need breathing room!

This seems like one of my father's old "long cuts" - short cuts that take longer and are more difficult than the usual route. I'll stick with the ease of the menu bar icon.

I rarely access the character pallet, but I know it can be ticked on/off from within the keyboard/mouse preferences.
My brother recently got himself a MacBook and we can't figure out why the tick box and the option to select or de-select the Character pallet is un-available! Any Ideas on how this can be fixed?
Currently he uses Pop-char, but I don't see the need to buy extra software to run something that’s built-in to OSX.

I wish spotlight would have a quick system for entering these characters. Maybe "command-space" then ";" and then some short name for the character. It could then paste it into the running app. I'm sure this is possible with some of the other accelerators (e.g. Quicksilverish) but it would be nice built in.

Some days I miss the alt-4-number thing that Windows has for Unicode characters. :-P

uhm, isn't it disabled by default?

anyway, quicksilver will let you bring up the palette.