Symbol input commands with Japanese input programs?
 

I'm trying to find shortcuts to type some special symbols which seem to be used very often in my reading materials. So far I have figured out some like おんぷ for ♪, から for ～, ほし for ☆... but there are still several ones I couldn't find, especially ―, which is the most common of all. Is there any site that lists input commands for such symbols? I find it's really annoying to input them by mouse.

Hmm, you know that symbol is on the standard keyboard already, right?

All American keyboards have it right in the upper left below the ESC key.

Same with ー, which is after the 0 and before the + key on American keyboards.

Hmm, actually they are variants. In the typing program I use, ~ and ～ appear quite different. I don't know why, but ~ looks smaller than ～ in the program. On this forum, it's the opposite, though.

Well, ー is part of the long vowels, so it's very easy to type. I knew that one ever since I started learning Japanese. What I'm trying to figure out is this one :



The symbol is widely used in both fictional works and dictionaries, so I think there should be a way to type them quickly. I'm thinking of creating my own input, but I don't know the term. Do you know how that symbol is called in Japanese?

You are using a weird program if, when you do Japanese input, typing ~ gives you ~ instead of 〜. On both OSX and Windows, 〜 is what shows up.

The first is a tilde. The second is the なみ／から／にょろ Japanese mark. If I am in US-input mode in OSX, ~ is ~. If I am in Japanese-input mode, 〜 is what comes out. Then I can spacebar through to get ~ if I want (tilde).

Gotcha. For reference, the first is called 長音符, 棒線, or any other different terms. The latter I don't know. But I sure can't type it on my keyboard. Kind of like how in Windows, it's difficult to type — (the em dash) and – (the en dash), neither of which appear on the keyboard (only the hyphen does).

Hyphen: used in words like "pre-existing"
En dash: used for number spans like "50–60"
Em dash: the dash used in writing like the parenthesis and colon like "He came to me—no, wait, he didn't."

(It just so happens on OSX all three are very easy to type hyphen, option+hyphen, shift+option+hyphen, but not on Windows.)

Perhaps the JP wikipedia entry has some help. I only skimmed it though. 長音符 - Wikipedia

Yeah, just as you said, the program I use is different from Windows IME or ATOK. The most significant difference is that, instead of using spacebar and scrolling through homophones, it uses the number keys and the full stop key, which happen to work really well for me. Typing 5 keys for the wave dash takes only half a second, so I have no problem with it. Thanks for なみ by the way. This will help me save から for the default inputting of actual words. :)

Thanks for the info. I'm a Windows user, and it looks like there's no shortcut for typing the long dash outside MS Word, so I guess I'll create my typing chain for it.