CatchChar: Puts Special Characters A Click Away

Windows: Typing special unicode characters is usually a pain, but CatchChar can make the process completely seamless. Once you've installed this simple app, keying in Alt-Shift-C will bring up a menu with quick access to commonly-used characters. Just click the one you want, and it will appear at your cursor's location. In the app's settings, you can also decide which characters appear in the menu, or edit the keyboard shortcut, though it must include Alt and Shift. If you're not running Windows, you can copy characters from a webapp. But CatchChar is as fast a solution as you'll find, with CatchChar, you can enter your favorite unicode characters in any edit box on Windows easily. CatchChar is a popup menu utility that you can customize to put your often used special characters. This is faster than looking for special characters in an on screen keyboard or in Windows Charmap utility that  requires an additional copy, paste operation.


HOW TO USE
Download and install CatchChar. Then run it and it sits in the tray icon area. To bring up its menu, press the hot key combination Alt-Shift-C. Then select any character from the menu and it is inserted at the current position.
CatchChar menu starts with very few default characters. The idea is that you would like to add your own characters to it. Click on Settings. Enter a unicode character in “New Character” box and hit Add Character to add it to the menu. You can take help of Windows Charmap utility to enter the special character for the first time. In the new version, you can enter more than one character.
If you want to change the hot key combination Alt-Shift-C that brings up CatchChar menu, click on Settings, then Change Hot Key. Select a character other than C and hit OK.

Making a portable copy: If you want to carry catchchar on a portable drive to use on any computer, this is now possible in version 1.5 or later.
Please follow these steps: (Only if you want to carry CatchChar on a portable drive. Otherwise, please don’t use them for your regular desktop installation.)

1. Install CatchChar to a desktop computer first. This will also update any existing copy of CarchChar.
2. Copy catchchar.exe from the installed folder of the desktop computer to a folder on your portable drive.
3. Rename the copied file to catchcharportable.exe. THIS STEP IS IMPORTANT.
4. That’s it. Now you can run it from the portable folder and it will save any customizations to its own folder.
5. If you have already customized the CatchChar popup menu on the desktop computer, please save your menu to a file from the Edit Menu screen before performing above steps. Then restore the menu file in the portable CatchChar.
6. If you had customized the hot key for CatchChar on the desktop computer, you will need to redo it for the CatchChar on the portable drive.

Insert Unicode Characters with CatchChar