Glad to have been of help. Obviously, I can’t comment on why you ended up with an international keybosrd—that said, until I finally retired back to the UK, my machines had been bought in China or Hong Kong, so came with international keyboards—but the input selector, if you enable it and you have different input systems as I do, is here towards the right hand end of the menu bar:
In former versions of the OS, the icon was the appropriate flag, but that changed somewhere around MacOS 12—I can never remember what previous versions were called!—to the current, somewhat subfusc, version.
I had been expecting a text prompt like ‘input’ on the menu bar. Your little image was helpful in that respect but nothing was displayed. It took a reboot to get it up and running.
Since spell checking is linked to input, I’ll try adding French as an input language. It all makes the portable a little more useful.
Thankyou.
And my MacBook has arrived, been set up, and I’m getting into Scrivener on a Mac, and learning that CTRL+C, etc., is not as universal a keyboard shortcut as I’d anticipated. Running with an external Windows keyboard at the moment, but might get a nice Mac specific one at some time in the future. For now, very happy with everything, and my thanks to all for their help and advice.
CTRL+C is ⌘+C on the Mac. Use the Keyboard Viewer to see which keys on your Windows keyboard map to the special Mac keys. I’ve been using an external Windows keyboard on my MacBook Pro for years now with no issues. On my keyboard the Windows key is ⌘ (command), and Alt is ⌥ (option).
One tip which can really help when you’re switching (and which no-one ever seems to point out…) is that any properly designed Mac program has a few built-in shortcuts which never vary. The two most important are:
cmd-, (i.e. cmd-comma) which brings up the settings for that program; and
cmd-? (ie. Cmd-shift-/), which brings up the help menu with your cursor in a search bar. If you type in the name of any feature you think should be there, you will be shown the relevant menu items.
You may be familiar with this from Windows Scrivener but it’s built into every Mac program and it’s very useful when you’re trying to find your way around. Along with the cmd-, shortcut, this will really help you get orientated in the first few days.
It’s also helpful to internalise the text navigation shortcuts – they’re pretty logical.
opt/alt - left/right = move backward/forward by word
cmd - left/right = move to beginning / end of line
opt/alt - up/down = move up/down by paragraph
cmd - up/down = move to top/bottom of document.
I.e. cmd movements are bigger than opt movements in any axis.
A couple more that may be useful
fn-delete = forward delete
opt/alt - tab = switch between programs
opt/alt - backtick = switch between windows of an open program.
Finally, to get accents hold a key down and you’ll be given a list of available variants. E.g. hold down a and you’ll be given the choice of 11 different versions, including à á â etc– just choose the associated number. AFAIK, this works with external keyboards too.
I can’t remember what the defaults are, but I use ctl-space for Select the previous input source and Ctl-shift-space for Select the next input source.
It’s obvious what they do, but the former brings up a menu of all your available inputs, while the latter just switches.
In Sonoma, if you’re in an editable field, the menu is a small bar under the cursor, otherwise it’s a big transparent popup, but they both work the same way – if you only have two sources, they’ll toggle between the options; if you have more, you cycle between them. It’s all fairly intuitive once you’ve got the shortcuts set up.
I can’t post a screenshot because the menu disappears as soon as you use the shortcut for screenshot… .
To add to this, tapping the fn key, bottom row extreme left on a laptop or small keyboard, to the right of the backspace key on an extended keyboard, may also function to change input sources (set that way by default I think).
Kind of makes sense after putting a globe icon on it. But for a time it defaulted to the Emoji / special chars picker (and still does for me, I didn’t change it, as far as I remember).
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