Sometimes you just need to use up and down arrow symbols without ALT codes, graphics, or other shenanigans. This one seems stupid simple, yet the answer did not occur to me for an embarrassingly long time.
I was designing a screen for selecting an item from a scrollable list in the C-more Micro programming software. I was using a > character as a cursor to point at the line that would be selected. The version of the C-more Micro I was using was not a touchscreen and had only five function keys for input. One function key moves the cursor up the list and another moves it down.
In the software, you can insert a Function object on the screen that specifies key press actions and what text is displayed above each function key, among other things. You’re limited to three characters per key on the Function object, so “Down” does not fit.
That’s fine, I thought, up and down arrows are better anyway. I’ll insert a caret symbol for “up” and… well there’s no upside-down caret on my keyboard. And lowercase v does not quite match the caret (^) symbol. The Function bar object does not seem to accept ALT-code characters, so ↑ (ALT+24) and ↓ (ALT+25) were out.
I briefly considered inserting bitmap objects for arrows on top of the Function object. For a while, I just used “UP” and “DN”.
Finally, it occurred to me to use slash and backslash characters to construct the arrows:
/\ and \/
Well duh! I mean, et voilà, up and down arrow symbols without ALT codes!
