Special Characters For Mac

The Special Characters status bar menu application is aimed at HTML developers because they frequently work with character entities or require their HEX/DEC values.

To simplify the developer’s workflow, Special Characters places a list with all characters in the status bar and keeps them organized by category: arrows, parentheses, pictographs, punctuation, Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, currency/letterlike/math symbols, and others.

Special Characters keeps track of the recently used characters and also enables you to create a favorites list. What’s more, the utility integrates a simple search tool that can simplify the process even more.

If you hover your mouse on top of a certain character, in the right area of the Special Characters panel you can see it’s name, the hexadecimal or the decimal value. If you click the symbol, a contextual menu allows you to place any of those values on your clipboard.

The same contextual menu offers you the option to add the character to your favorites list. Note that to remove a character from the list you must simply use the contextual menu again.

Via the Special Characters Preferences window, you can choose to open the app at login, or you can set up a global hotkey for opening the status bar panel. However, you cannot change anything when it comes to appearance.

The later can prove frustrating if you are using the light status bar color mode: the Special Characters comes with a light colored icon, and it will not be visible in the bar.

On the other hand, if you opted for the dark menu bar in the OS X System Preferences, you should not have any problems.