Saturday, May 29, 2010

The case of the missing Tilde ~

The case of the missing Tilde ~

I've been looking at Ruby on Rails recently following the book Rails for .Net developers. This has meant I've been working in a Windows 7 VM in my Mac Book Pro. (I use the excellent Parallels). At some point in the book I had to use the tilde (~) symbol but the life of me couldn't find it as the tilde (~) key produces a pipe |. My Web Search skills failed me and there seemed to be nothing on the Parallels site but eventually I discovered it. So for the benefit of the next person to search I'm going to document it here. 

To type a tilde (~) in a windows 7 vm on parallels with a macbook pro you press:

SHIFT and §  

That's shift and the section sign symbol (§) which is the ±.

EDIT: This works for VMWare too.