Smart (curly) Quotes in MSN / Windows Live Messenger

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Undocumented MSN / Windows Live Messenger “feature”: Shift+Ctrl+” (Shift+Ctrl+Quotation Mark) toggles smart or curly quotes in the Conversation Window. Unfortunately, not only does this completely undocumented keystroke not give any feedback to the user (and it’s easy to press this by mistake while IMing away) but also breaks some emoticons: [Weepie] produces a weepie [Weepie], but :‘( and :’( produce nothing.

Update: The shortcut is Shift+Ctrl+Quotation Mark on US keyboards only. On British keyboards the shortcut is Shift+Ctrl+~.

Update 2: This still happens in the latest version of Live Messenger (14.0.8089.726), which is why I’ve bumped this post to 2010 (I first wrote about this bug in 2004!).

3 thoughts on “Smart (curly) Quotes in MSN / Windows Live Messenger”

  1. Heya — you are google #1 for “msn messenger smart quotes” which is a good thing cuz I had no idea how I turned that shit on and now I do and have turned it off. Killer dude, thanks.

    Wow, turns out I’m commenting on a fairly old post!

  2. thank you so much! you saved my life. i was about to replace the quotes key on my keyboard!

  3. Best page EVER. Every once in a while, I’d enable these smart quotes by accident. Now I’ve finally got rid of them. Cheers!