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.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I do love my MacBook but the keyboard does drive me mad. It took me ages to find the # key under Win7 in parallels and OSX. There are far too many keys hidden behind keys. Bit of a UX nightmare tbh.

I still haven't found Pg up/ Pg down in Windows.

workmad3 said...

Ah :) Also known as 'the case of the differing Apple and Windows key layouts'. IIRC, that's the same key *positions* you use for a tilde in windows, but obviously the keys are labeled otherwise ;)

vege said...

I found you can install

Mapping 0x0056 to Key `~ should do the work.

http://www.randyrants.com/sharpkeys/