What is the ¬ key?

bash keyboard

22,010

Solution 1

¬ is most commonly used to represent negation in symbolic logic; ~ is also often used for that purpose, so it's reasonable that ¬ should appear in place of ~ on a keyboard which uses ¬ at all. I'm not sure why UK keyboards include it, but there's no reason I can see why you shouldn't replace it with ~ if you so please.

Solution 2

[This probably isn't the answer you're looking for, but I'll leave it here in case someone finds this question when looking for meanings of that glyph.]

I have sometimes seen that glyph used to represent a "soft [carriage] return". A "soft return" is a nonprinting character that suggests a line break that is not a paragraph break. See the Soft and hard returns section in Wikipedia's "word wrap" article.

The "Script Editor" app for AppleScript would show that symbol when you'd entered a soft return to break the line to make it more human-readable, but you didn't want to break the line from a syntax point of view (AppleScript was like Python in that whitespace was semantically meaningful).

22,010

wim

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

wim over 1 year

Struggling with UK keyboards, having recently moved here! Sorry for this oddball question, but the topic proved difficult to google about.

To the left of key number 1, where I used to have backtick ` and tilde ~, instead there is this symbol ¬ that I have never needed before in my life. Does it do anything useful in bash? What's it called? Why is it important enough to be there on UK keymaps? Any reason not to remap my good old homedir squiggle ~ back into that spot?
Spiff over 10 years

It seems to be a holdover from IBM mainframe terminal keyboards, which needed a logical negation symbol for the PL/1 programming language. IBM based their original PC keyboards on their pre-existing terminal keyboards.
interestinglythere over 8 years

For people unfamiliar with AppleScript, another way to say this is that ¬ is the line continuation character, similar to how `` is used at the end of a line in many other languages to indicate that the statement continues to the next line.
RJFalconer almost 8 years

Heh, "most commonly". I would assume it's more commonly used to make the emoticon "¬_¬", but yes, let's keep things intellectual.