Four Column ASCII
Robbie V (via @angealbertini):
I found this gem on Hacker News the other day. User soneil posted to a four column version of the ASCII table that blew my mind. I just wanted to repost this here so it is easier to discover.
Here’s an excerpt from the comment:
I always thought it was a shame the ascii table is rarely shown in columns (or rows) of 32, as it makes a lot of this quite obvious. eg, http://pastebin.com/cdaga5i1 It becomes immediately obvious why, eg, ^[ becomes escape. Or that the alphabet is just 40h + the ordinal position of the letter (or 60h for lower-case). Or that we shift between upper & lower-case with a single bit.
[…]
In the terminal you can type these control characters by holding the
CTRL(control characters, get it?) key in combination with another key. For example, as many experienced vim users know pressingCTRL+[in the terminal (which is^[in caret notation) is the same as pressing theESCkey. But why is the escape key triggered by the[character? Why not another character? This is the insight soneil shares with us.
