Switcher FAQ No. 1: Where’s $KEY on that Keyboard?
I think every single person I’ve talked to after they switched to the Mac platform has asked this question. It’s particularly difficult for people with German keyboards since all the characters Unix people and programmers usually need such as tilde, backslash, braces, and brackets are not printed on the keyboard and only accessible using Option or Option-Shift. But fortunately, Mac OS X comes with a little tool to help you figure out where all those keys are:
Keyboard Viewer.
It can be enabled in System Preferences / International / Input Menu. This will automatically place the Input Menu (that’s the little menu with the flag icon) into your menu bar, containing an entry for Keyboard Viewer. In Keyboard Viewer, just press any of the modifier keys (Shift, Option, Option-Shift) to see the key mappings.
If that was too fast, here’s a little movie to show you how it’s done.
