This summons the Character Viewer pop-up window. One keyboard shortcut is Control-Command-Space bar. You can find a lengthy list of such shortcuts on Apple’s Mac keyboard shortcuts page. Another way to do it is to simply use keyboard shortcuts. To apply them, keep depressing the Option key, click the orange key in the Keyboard Viewer, then click the letter on your physical keyboard that you want to apply it to. This shows some diacritical marks that can be added above some letters. Also, when you press and hold this key, some keys appear in orange. Press and hold the Option key to view even more characters. For example, if you press and hold the Shift key, the top row of keys changes to a tilde, exclamation point, ampersand, etc. Youll find it under Edit -> Emoji and Symbols in any program that takes text input. You must press and hold modifier keys on your physical keyboard to see more. More generally, Mac OS X provides a pane to insert special characters. When first opened, the Keyboard Viewer simply shows the usual characters you see on your keyboard. What’s more, you can access hidden characters by holding down your keyboard’s Shift and Option keys, separately or together. With the Keyboard Viewer enabled, you can insert a character into your text by clicking its key on this virtual keyboard. To enable the Keyboard Viewer, go to System Preferences > Keyboard, and click the checkbox next to “Show viewers for keyboard, emoji and symbols menu bar.” The viewer now appears in the top right side of the menu bar.

The macOS has a feature called Keyboard and Character Viewers that shows an onscreen representation of your Mac’s keyboard.

This allows you to find the “hidden” characters that you can type. Ever wanted to type a character such as (), € and £ on your Mac, but can’t figure out how to do it? You’ll need to summon up the virtual keyboard in macOS.

Symbols for mac commands