Absent Curly Brackets Keys "{ }"- MacBook Pro Portuguese Keyboard

Question

Absent Curly Brackets Keys "{ }"- MacBook Pro Portuguese Keyboard

Dear community members,

I bought a MacBook Pro M3 from Portugal, with a keyboard in Portuguese. I saw there are no opening and closing curly brackets "{ }" natively on this keyboard. After using the "Option" key combined with any other key, do not return these curly brackets. "Option + 'parentheses'" returned me square brackets "[ ]" instead.

So is there a way to remap keys on the MacBook Pro keyboard so I can switch from any useless symbols to curly brackets or get them natively using some combination keys?

In time: the Apple support website Atalhos de teclado do Mac - Suporte Apple (PT) does not have the answer.

Thank you in advance!

Sincerely,

Marcelo Regis Bernardo

MacBook Pro (M3 Pro, 2023)

Posted on Nov 29, 2023 4:07 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

121,672 points

Nov 29, 2023 4:36 AM in response to MRSleepWalker

Basic keys like that are always somewhere. To find them, you can use Keyboard Viewer

Use the Keyboard Viewer on Mac - Apple Support

For Portuguese it should be Option shift 8 and Option shift 9

If you get something else, you have the wrong input source active. Go to system settings > keyboard > text input > edit and make sure that only Portuguese is on your input source list.

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Answer 2

Nov 29, 2023 4:49 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Oh, my gosh! I used "Option" + "Shift" + "8" (or "9") and... tah dah... it worked! I could never realize I could use "Shift" key combined with "Option" key to get other symbols. Thank you Tom Gewecke

and everyone for the patience and for interactions with this thread. 👏🏽

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Answer 3

Nov 29, 2023 4:38 AM in response to Rudegar

"Option + '7/'" returns a classic "divided by" symbol (÷); "Option + '§±'" returns "§" and so on. There are many useless combination keys on this keyboard, no one applicable for those ones who use MacBook for programming and text editors who use tags (like LaTeX). 🥹🤬

I've found a workaround using the 🌐 (fn) to open character viewer and putting {} as favorites. But it's quite annoying to keep that app open or reopen it all the time, since "{" and "}" are keys for frequent use.

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