Rod Waldhoff's Weblog  

< Monday, 21 July 2003 >
Curly braces, Pipes, Escape and other characters on the Zaurus #

If you've ever tried to type code, pseudo-code or shell scripts on the Sharp Zaurus, you may have noticed that the little slide-out keyboard is missing some useful keys. If you've done much typing with this thumb-keyboard, you may have noticed that when you fat-finger a couple of keys, you can get some of those extra characters. For my reference as much as yours, here's a short list:

keys character unicode value name
[Fn]+z   0x005A(?) undo
[Fn]+[Shift]+c 0x20AC euro symbol
[Fn]+[Shift]+[Backspace] [ 0x005B left square bracket
[Fn]+[Shift]+, ] 0x005D right square bracket
[Fn]+[Shift]+. { 0x007B left curly brace
[Fn]+[Shift]+[Enter] } 0x007D right curly brace
[Fn]+[Shift]+' ^ 0x005E caret/circumflex
[Fn]+[Shift]+[Space] ` 0x0060 tick/backquote
[Shift]+[Space] | 0x007C pipe
[Shift]+[Tab] \ 0x005C backslash (note that this is listed incorrectly in the sharp doc)

In the table above, "[Fn]" means the purple "function" key, "[Shift]" means the arrow-up "shift" key, "[Backspace] means the white back-arrow/delete key, "[Enter]" means the purple "return" key, "[Space]" means the space bar, "[Tab]" means the purple tab key, and a "+" means hit these keys in combination, typically by holding down the "meta" keys first.

Also notice that the "Cancel" button works like "Escape", which makes VI usable without resorting to the on-screen (virtual) keyboard.

There's a full keycode mapping table available on Sharp's site.