How about a key for those people who cannot finish a complete thought (particularly IM'ers) without trailing off every comment with three periods... gee... that would be really neat!
Maybe you could use your SysRq key for that purpose... (it's the one under the print screen key)...-- Cedar Park, Jan 02 2003 So remap it if you want, or lose the ellipsis habit. Programmable macros are available everywhere; no need for these "a key for this thing that gets typed a lot" ideas.-- egnor, Jan 02 2003 I was just looking at the keyboard again, and I thought to myself, does pressing the 'delete-home' key get me out of my mortgage? Or just summon a tornado?
Just wondering...-- Cedar Park, Jan 02 2003 Baked in Microsoft Word: Ctrl-Alt-. (period). In other programs on Windows: Alt-0133.-- krelnik, Jan 02 2003 I know the point of Word's ctrl-alt-. is that a typgraphical ellipsis looks different than three periods in a row, but I can't help loving the fact that the short cut takes as many keystrokes as the old way. :)-- ry4an, Jan 03 2003 Well, the AutoCorrect function will insert it for you if you type three periods, so you can even type EXACTLY the same three keys and get the same effect.-- krelnik, Jan 03 2003 Nope: I find ellipses are annoyingly over-used, not least by myself, so I vote against making them easier to produce.
For one thing, ellipses are often incorrectly used as either sentence separators or as a mechanism for merging run-on sentences. Ugh: exhausting to read.
And for another, and again applying particularly to my own writing, I don't much like the way they make the writer appear hesitant, indecisive, or unsure of his stance. (Unless of course that's the impression the writer wants to give: but how often is that the case?)
Finally, it rather skews the original meaning of ellipsis, which is to indicate the omission of quoted material.-- JKew, Jan 04 2003 I could be wrong, but an eplises is . . . not ... otherwise its just three periods which mean nothing.-- notme, Jan 04 2003 [notme], if you're going to be ridiculously pedantic about typography, you should spell the bloody word right.-- egnor, Jan 04 2003 Heh, I'm not normally the pedantic type, excecpt with people who are pedantic with me. I just had a professor (from germany. . .) who would demand the spaces. I had to use the chance to correct someone else on it.-- notme, Jan 05 2003 Baked in Macintosh: option-Z-- ed, Dec 20 2005 I found an html entity for the ellipsis! I thought there must be one. So, in fact, it isn't . . . or ... it's … (…).
Edit: That obviously didn't work. Does this site eat html entities? Is there any way to add one to an annotation?-- NoOneYouKnow, Dec 20 2005 . . . ... …-- Shz, Dec 20 2005 Ed said: “Baked in Macintosh: option-Z”
[Ed] Isn't this alt-: ? …-- Ehrm, Dec 20 2005 -... ..- -.-- rainbow, Dec 23 2005 random, halfbakery