I wish articles like this would say what ^D means. I remember when I was new to Unix it took me a while to realize that I wasn't supposed to type a literal caret (^) followed by a D.
For reference it means Ctrl+D, unless you you have a strange keyboard from Sun or something.
^D is the old school way of writing it; you'd see it so much you'd only ever once be confused about it, generally in the very first few days you were learning to use a computer.
It's never used anymore, I suppose, except for the old school people who still have enough muscular memory built up to write it that way. I know I do; I learned it from some computer magazine in the 80's and have a hard time letting go.
I dunno if I'd say it was never used anymore. Try running `cat` (to bring up a basic termainal input) and type various control keys. Anything that isn't interpreted by the tty is probably displayed using caret notation.
> It's never used anymore, I suppose, except for the old school people who still have enough muscular memory built up to write it that way. I know I do; I learned it from some computer magazine in the 80's and have a hard time letting go.
I was born after the 80s, and I use that shorthand (although I suppose this probably says more about me than it does about the shorthand itself). I didn't even understand the original comment until I read through the whole thing because I mentally read it as "Ctrl+D"
I just tried to search for it as if I didn't know and it was hard. Maybe wikipedia should describe that ^ is common representation among first lines, not in details section. Also macOS (former osx) uses this symbol everywhere: http://www.macinstruct.com/images/command.png
Yes, but it is so annoying and confusing that these symbols are not printed on the actual keyboard. Looking at the keyboard doesn't help much when I try to press a shortcut I just saw in the menu.
And then imagine trying to escape telnet on an international keyboard (Swedish in my case). Telnet actually kind of works, if you press ctrl+altgr+8 (which is one hell of a hand-twister), but many games and GUIs ONLY allow you to press the listed, with no other modifiers.
So many games don't even allow you to open the console, because they assume that your key next to 1 is ~, and so don't work for § (next to 1) or altgr+¨ (the layout's ~). Or switch between looking at characters or scancodes depending on the context, and thus work in some cases but not all.
^D, Ctrl+D and C-d are all different ways of saying the same thing. There's nothing particularly neutral about Ctrl+D, any more than there is about using the word 'water' to mean the substance of which the oceans are mostly comprised — it's just another dialect's term.
The same argument you made could be used if the author used the unicode codes for Ctrl+D, which I find to be an indication that the argument was a bit weak. The article itself is written in English, and to expand upon your metaphor, tt would be strange to use the term agua to refer to water in an English article. Language is really based around what people use, so using what people know is generally considered good communication. If you use something different it's considered good form to explain why. Each representation you chose is effectively shorthand for the English phrase 'Control + D', just with different stylistic representations. People are much more familiar with Ctrl+D to refer to the key combination of Control and D.
Anyways, I had the same issue when I first started using Linux. It probably took me over a year to realize the caret stood for ctrl, and that's only because I accidentally typed it in something that printed the codes literally.
It's not about neutrality, it's about ease of understanding. For me at least, when speaking about something that can be entered into a keyboard ^D is less obvious than Ctrl+D–I need to press the key labeled "control" to issue the proper command, the key labeled "^" will not suffice.
To be really pedantic (sorry! I'm not complaining about your comment), your keyboard does not have any key labelled 'control', it is always (AFAIK) abbreviated as 'ctrl'. Which is really weird to me, as it's hardly a big word needing abbreviating, and keyboards often have other long words written on the keys ('delete', 'page down', and so on).
On top of that, the shortened 'ctrl' is really a terrible abbreviation. It's not obvious that it stands for 'control' and I would guess that most non-techy people would have no idea that it means this word. Plus, it's near to another key with multiple letters ('alt'). The overall effect is that 'ctrl' appears to just be a jumble of letters with some esoteric meaning. A really odd design decision. Why not just put 'control' on the key and be done with it?
You're incorrect, especially for the typical reader here. A good chunk (maybe not over 50%, but its gotta be close) of the regular readers on this site use Macs. Most Mac keyboards, including the ones on the Macbook Pro, spell it out. Same for most non IBM/IBM-PC compatible keyboards.
How odd! My mac keyboard is a similar design, but has 'ctrl', and has no writing on the shift keys, caps lock and so on. The only unabbreviated word it has is 'delete'.
Perhaps the standard is something to do with the country (mine is a UK layout).
For reference it means Ctrl+D, unless you you have a strange keyboard from Sun or something.