I prefer to use curly quotes and apostrophes in my posts, but unfortunately they are tricky to use on Windows. You have to type an incantation like ALT + 0147 to get “ and ALT + 0148 to get ” — and only on the keyboard number pad, not the numbers in the top row.

animated image of a black woman on a news channel exclaiming “ain’t nobody got time for that!”

Alas, I have no number pad currently.

In recent years I’ve been using the Graphemica site since I have this search in my browser autocomplete: https://graphemica.com/search?q=quote. It’s a good reference site, but it is still a bit tedious to copy the characters.

Stack Overflow came to the rescue with a one-liner browser bookmarklet that lets you put text in your clipboard using the Clipboard API.

So I set up these four bookmarklets. You can create a new bookmark in your browser, enter a title for it, then copy the full bookmarklet line into the URL field. Rinse and repeat. Each bookmarklet URL should start with javascript:

Left Quote:
javascript: navigator.clipboard.writeText('“');

Right Quote:
javascript: navigator.clipboard.writeText('”');

Right Single Quote / Apostrophe:
javascript: navigator.clipboard.writeText('’');

Left Single Quote:
javascript: navigator.clipboard.writeText('‘');

I initially had the null; at the end like the Stack Overflow answer. That worked in Chrome but I found it didn’t work in Firefox. When I removed it, it worked in both.

#bookmarklet #writing #dev

gRegor Morrill