Curly apostrophes on a mac
2025-08-15 15:38:02 +01:00 by Mark Smith
A while back I noticed that the apostrophes that I was typing were not the right ones. In code you are always using single quotes ' and double quotes ", but for writing I find that the apostrophes look better when they are the curly ones. I was very shocked to find that the mac keyboards do not have keys for the curly variety.
Then after some googling, I thought I had figured it out. By typing the kind of cryptic key combination option-] you would get a curly apostrophe. Life was good, I continued on with my writing. At some point though I realised that these curly apostrophes looked a bit strange. I figured it was just my eye sight, which is not as good as it used to be. But I eventually looked into it, with some form of zooming in and sure enough the curly apostrophes were going the wrong way. All this time, many months, my apostrophes have been all wrong!
I‘d, I‘m, isn‘t it, ‘init, and all the other times you use apostrophes, all wrong.
Well yesterday I discovered that you can get the curly to go the other way with, wait for it, shift-option-].
I’d, I’m, isn’t it, and of course my favorite, ’init.
Ok you don’t technically need an apostrophe with init or innit (19 frigging pages wtf) or indeed with it’s somewhat less famous counter part isit, but this seemed like an opportune moment to make use of these, which I’ve always felt are in some way a sort of London version of like, even if they of course mean something completely different.
In any case, from now on, most of my curly apostrophes should go the right way. #