Keyboard Shortcut Symbols

What are the keyboard shortcut symbols?

They are the marks printed on modifier keys and used to write shortcuts: ⌘ for Command, ⌥ for Option, ⇧ for Shift, ⌃ for Control, along with ⏎, ⌫, ⇥, ⎋ and the rest. All of them are ordinary Unicode characters, so they can be copied into any document, ticket, README or design file.

The table on this page gives each one with the name people use, the name Unicode actually assigns it, and its code point. The two names are rarely the same, which is the interesting part and the reason the third column is here rather than left out.

Above the table is a formatter. Type a shortcut however you happen to write it and it produces both house styles — the Microsoft one, which spells the key names and joins them with plus signs, and the Apple one, which strings the symbols together with no separator at all.

How to use this page

1. Type a shortcut in whatever form you have it. It reads “Ctrl+Shift+P”, “cmd shift p”, “ctrl-alt-del” and “⌘⇧P” alike, and it accepts the aliases people actually use — cmd, meta, opt, alt, esc, del.
2. Copy whichever style you need. Windows style on the left, Apple style on the right, each with a copy button. Modifiers are put in the conventional order regardless of the order you typed them, so ⌘⇧A and ⇧⌘A both come out the same way.
3. Read the notes under the output. They name the rule that changed what you typed, not a preference. If you wrote Escape, it will tell you the style guide says Esc, and why.

The symbols are not named after keyboards

Of the twenty-six symbols listed here, exactly two have the word “key” anywhere in their official Unicode name: OPTION KEY and DECIMAL SEPARATOR KEY SYMBOL. Every other one is named for its shape or for a generic action, and reading the list is a small pleasure.

⌘ is PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN. It is a Nordic road sign marking a tourist attraction, adopted for the Command key when Apple decided the logo was appearing on screen too often. ⎋, the Escape key, is BROKEN CIRCLE WITH NORTHWEST ARROW. The spacebar symbol ␣ is OPEN BOX. ⇧ is UPWARDS WHITE ARROW and ⌃ is UP ARROWHEAD — no mention of Shift or Control in either. And ⌴ is COUNTERBORE, which is a machining term for a flat-bottomed hole.

There is no keyboard block in Unicode either. These symbols are scattered across three blocks: most are in Miscellaneous Technical, ten of them are simply arrows, and the spacebar symbol sits on its own in Control Pictures. Nobody ever gathered them, because they were encoded for different reasons at different times.

The practical consequence is worth stating: “Command” and “Shift” are conventions, not standard names. If you search a character map for “command” you will not find ⌘, and if you paste it somewhere that shows Unicode names, the tooltip will say something about a place of interest. This page prints both columns so neither surprises you.

Two house styles, both documented

Microsoft publishes prescriptive rules for writing shortcuts, and the formatter applies them rather than inventing anything. Keys are joined with a plus sign and no spaces — Alt+Ctrl+S. Key names take sentence capitalization, so it is “Caps lock” and “Page up”, not “Caps Lock” and “Page Up”. Escape is always written Esc. And Ctrl is the Windows spelling only: the guide says explicitly not to use it for the Mac keyboard, where the keys are Control and Command and are genuinely different keys.

One rule is easy to miss and matters more than it looks. Punctuation must be spelled out — Plus sign, Minus sign, Hyphen, Period, Comma — because a shortcut like Ctrl+Shift++ cannot be read. The formatter does this, so typing ctrl+shift+, gives you Ctrl+Shift+Comma.

Apple's convention is the opposite shape: the symbols themselves, concatenated, with no separator. The same shortcut is Shift+Command+P in one house and ⇧⌘P in the other, and neither is a translation of the other — they are different systems for writing the same key presses. Mixing them, which is what most documentation does, is where the confusion comes from.

There is one honest gap. The Microsoft guide does not cover every key: it has no spelling for Command beyond noting that the key “isn't named on the keyboard”, and none for Eject or Clear. Where that happens the formatter falls back to the common name and the notes say so, rather than pretending a rule exists.

Honest limits

Whether a symbol appears depends on your font. These are real characters, but plenty of fonts have no glyph for the less common ones, and you will see a box instead. That is a font problem rather than a text problem — the character copies correctly regardless of whether your screen can draw it.

The symbols are also not universal across platforms. ⌥ means Option on a Mac and, on a Windows keyboard, the equivalent key is Alt with no symbol printed on it at all. The formatter maps between them because that is what people need, but a mapping is a convention rather than an equivalence: Command and Ctrl occupy the same role and are not the same key, which is exactly why the style guide forbids writing Ctrl for the Mac.

Finally, only the Windows column follows a published rule. The Apple column follows observed convention — symbols, concatenated, modifiers in a conventional order — which is consistent across Apple's own documentation but is not a numbered rule you can cite the way the Microsoft one is. Where this page states a rule, it is quoting; where it states a convention, it says so.

Why is it free?

Because it is a table and some string formatting. Everything runs in your browser, nothing you type is uploaded, and there is no server involved in writing out a shortcut.

So there is no account, no sign-up and nothing held back. The generator that pulls every name and code point from the Unicode Character Database is in the repository beside the page, along with the 137-assertion test suite that checks the names, the parser and each style rule separately — including the negative controls that stop those tests passing for the wrong reason.