How to backslash an Apple

The migration from Windows to OSX is going rather well. Everything works the way I like and sometimes even better. Or not?

A huge advantage of OSX is the fact you can open up a terminal screen and have the full power of linux commands. You can ‘grep’ yourself through logfiles or quickly edit some configs … pause … NOT! (Thx to Borat for this joke). Ok, the power is there, but Apple must be thinking:

SCREW YOU DUTCH PEOPLE, we’ll only give pipe and backslash keys to the qwerty users … that for being dutch. But because you have the best chocolate we’ll give you an easy accessible @ symbol on the topleft, 16 functions buttons and some other buttons even we don’t know the function of. Should you have any troubles you can always press the ‘HELP’ button that we have included on your keyboard. Ok we admit, it doesn’t really help you for you keyboard problems … but hey … what other keyboards have a help button?

After a long websearch (yes this took me more than 5 minutes to find) I found out that shift + alt is the solution!
Shift + alt + / gives me a nice \ (no DO NOT use the / on the keypad, that would be the-to-easy-way)
Shift + alt + L give me the much wanted | symbol (and I do hope this is the pipe symbol and not just some vertical line)

So we Azerty users are not left in the cold, only in the dark if it comes to information! Oh by the way Apple, thanks for including an easy accessible £ button, we really needed that since they introduced the … (goddamned where did they put that euro symbol???)