How To Type ♺ On Mac, And The Reasons Why Not

There are a lot of arguments against using the ‘♺’ recycle symbol for retweet:

1. It is a unicode multibyte character, which means it is not well supported in old, old architectures like Windows XP, cell phones, and other cob-webby places.
2. It is not shorter that ‘RT’, but longer, so it uses more characters than it appears to.
3. It is hard to type.

I can’t do much about the first two — and those may be show stoppers — but I really like the symbol itself.

In my case, I only have direct messages going to my cell phone, and they are almost never retweets. I am sorry for all the poor benighted souls out there using Windows XP, but I can’t base my Tweetling around that junk.

For those using Mac apps, here’s the skinny on getting a fast path to using ‘♺’:

[from Mac OS X 10.5 Help: Typing special characters and symbols]

To use the Character Palette:

1. Open the application you want to enter special characters in, and place the insertion point where you want the special character or symbol to appear.
2. Choose Edit > Special Characters to open the Character Palette, or open the Input menu and choose Show Character Palette.
3. Choose the type of characters you want to see from the View pop-up menu at the top of the Character Palette window.

   If you don’t see the View pop-up menu, click the button in the upper-right corner of the Character Palette to show the top portion of the window.
   
   

4. Click an item in the list on the left to see the characters that are available in each category.
   
   
5. Double-click the character or symbol in the right column that you want to insert into your document.

   You can also select the character and click Insert. To see more options for each character, such as the variations in glyphs for some characters, click the Character Info triangle and then the Font Variation triangle at the bottom of the Character Palette window.

To find the recycle symbol, I had to select ‘all characters’ and then look under ‘miscellaneous characters’. I then placed ‘♺’ in the ‘Favorites’ so it would be faster to find in the future.

Theoretically, this should work with any Mac app with a ‘Edit’ menu.