Dude where’s my hashtag

I first wrote a variation of this article on the now defunct Triond back around 2002, it was one of my most regularly read articles, a bare minimum of one-thousand five hundred people made the search each and every, month and for the duration of Triond’s life earned me enough money each month to buy a loaf of bread and maybe a little more omen a good month, not bad really for something that took me only a few minvites to write, when Triond closed down some years later the article I had written had been read over 3 million times. Surprisingly, while the article is long gone as is Triond, I discovered only yesterday that Apple Mac users are still stumbling upon this issue some 19 years later, it’s still one of the largest used Apple Mac search references, according to Google anyway, so who am I to argue?

While having a Mac of some description definately has its benefit, when it comes to creative skills, gander across the keyboard and you’ll see that all important # symbol is nowhere to be seen at least on Macs over two years old, or at time of writing this wasthe case, at least on 95% of Apple Macs outside the United States that at least, Macs now being produced in the United States I’m reliably informed do have a hashtag. Only Macs made within the last two years clearly have the Hashtag marked up And easily accessible.

I made a point of querying this with a Apple customer service employee during a telephone call all that way back. Back when Apple staff would bend over backwards to make you happy, before the brand had absolute dominance And cared far less about making their customers happy. The response to my query was that Apple firmly believed that the Hashtag or to use the correct term octothorp would become and was a redundant function, but for those that needed it, there was a shortcut they installed for those that needed it, regardless of how few and far between they may be. Apparently an actual scientific study was conducted that stated that the octothorp was used less than once in a million key movements, one wondered what that figure would be today. Apple clearly had not factored in social media back them, lets face it only the very few had, hard to believe that in the early 2000s it was a non entity and that within five short years the octothorp would start to become the giant it has cone today.

So without further todo, here is the answer, to create a hashtag on European/U.K. format Mac’s push and hold the function button plus the number 3. Some earlier editions and non European and US versions may require you to push function, alt and 3. While US users who have a shift key need to push shift and the number 3.

It’s fascinating to think that there was no mention of this function anywhere on a Mac keyboard for quite some time, as I write this on my 2012 MacBook Air with not an octothorp in sight.

While I have you here, here’s another couple of useful tips. If you click Command+F to find specific areas of a page, so for example if you wanted to skip past the back story of the octothorp story and go straight to the goodnes you could Command+F to find it. But if you use Command+G if the thing your looking at comes up multiple times, it allows you to navigate to the various sections on the page, jumping from one mention to the next, without having to trawl through the entire article.

Finally if you want to simply close the page you are viewing and occasionally close the wrong window, this is particularly useful if you have multiple browsers tags open at the same time, then use the Command+W option, this will only ever close the thing you are currently looking at, therefore saving you the hassle of missing out on other pages you held open .