I’ve been using a Canadian keyboard this morning, and even after much specific and random key-hunting I utterly failed to find the ‘’ backslash key. I had to resort to using the on-screen keyboard set to British every time I wanted to enter a UNC path or ’
'.
Where is the damned thing? Does it exist? How do Canadians (is it the same as a US keyboard) live without a backslash?
I have to use the thing all afternoon too, help!
Phil
I believe Canadians use the same layout as us in the US.
\ is typically located above the enter key on the right. Sometimes it floats around in the general area depending on the exact keyboard manufacturer, but that’s it’s common location.
/ is typically located on the same key as ? towards the bottom right.
I just looked up this page on wikipedia and it does seem that there’s a different layout for some types of Canadian keyboards. Hopefully those charts help, but I don’t see why that’d be of greater assistance than having the keyboard in front of you.
Weird.
Perhaps they all use unix.
When I was travelling in Mexico a couple of years ago, I was in an internet cafe doing some e-mails and I couldn’t for the life of me find the ‘@’ key. It just wasn’t there. I asked the pretty young lady running the place (in my very broken Spanish) where it was and there was a trick to it. I can’t remember exactly what it was but it was something like a ‘CTRL’+‘Shift’+some function key and then, magically the ‘@’ sign showed up in my e-mail address. Weird. 
i use dvorak, it is much faster and is way more fun
Until you have to do common things like ctrl-c and ctrl-v (assuming you’re right handed and use the mouse with your right hand).
Maybe the keyboard was just made in Canada… and meant for some lame country that would buy a keyboard without a backslash.
most of us use the same keyboard as the US, but we also have a Canadian French and Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard. I have used all of them, and they are mostly the same except that it has characters and dead keys for accents and such when typing in French.
I think the backslash is in the top left corner (next to the 1) if I remember correctly.
I`m probably the only one who has this ¨ on the keyboard… äëïöü. only for vogals.
Canadian French and Multilingual Standard have it
It’s prolly in the same place as on a US keyboard.
A friend of mine used to help me with my Linux setup… drove him nuts because I bought a French keyboard, even though I don’t speak French 
Also annoyed him that I linked set it up so that when he tried to run nano, it ran vim (Linux joke) 
Huh? You mean this one ^^^^^ that you typed in your post?
Keep this page open, and copy and paste the backslash whenever you need it. What could be more convenient? And you have an excuse to browse the forums at work because it’s work-related.
Or…
Is it Windows? Type the ASCII value (in decimal) of the desired character while holding down the ALT key. For example…
ALT-6-5 = A
ALT-6-6 = B
ALT-9-2 = \
(don’t hold all the keys down at once – it’s not like rebooting, LOL)
Edit: perhaps these days it’s the Unicode value, not the ASCII value. I’m not sure.
OMG, habbywall – I love you! Okay, not really. But you are definitely way cool, because cool people type in Dvorak.
Take a look at this thread, which I started in Feb 2003.
…
Keep up at the back, dearie… 
Through sheer luck stuff broke yesterday so I didn’t have to struggle through the afternoon; that fun remains for today. I had however forgotten about the whole alt-something-something-something thingy, so now I shall face the day safe in the knowledge that I can type a slash after all, it will just take three times as long…
Phil
The UK keyboard drove me crazy when I was over there. There are only a few differences, but there are enough to make you go insane.
Oops, I didn’t read as carefully as you wrote.
I knew you were geeky enough to know about the Alt thing… And I also knew you were geeky enough that I needed to specify that you type the value in decimal – not hex, or octal, or binary.
But it won’t take three times as long, because you are holding down the Alt key. It’s probably more like two-and-a-half times as long.
Evidently not geeky enough, though… otherwise I wouldn’t have had to remove the keyboard from the cable and spend ages tapping out the keycodes on the bare wire ends while using a multimeter to see if caps lock was on or not.
I feel like such a fraud… 
Phil
Keyboards are for BABIES! Just give us the bare wires!
QWERTY? Dvorak? How about… voltages! Get out your original IBM PC documentation, because the keyboard does scan codes, not ASCII (remember two bytes for the fancy keys? 15 byte internal buffer?).
Or go the other way. Ink on the keys? Ancient technology.