American Standard Code for Information Interchange
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which everyone calls ASCII, is a character set which a computer uses to store characters. ASCII specifies a method for computers to store printable characters such as letters A to Z, a to z, digits 0 to 9, punctuation, and spaces. ASCII also includes control characters such as newline. Most computers either use ASCII, or a superset of ASCII that adds more characters, such as accented letters, Cyrillic letters, CJK characters, or hieroglyphics.
NetHack uses ASCII for everything. The source code is in ASCII. If you play in tty mode, everything on the screen is ASCII. Also, ASCII corresponds nicely with the keys found on most QWERY keyboards in the United States. In fact, the dungeon contains every ASCII character except "7", "8", "9", and "," (the comma).
The printable ASCII characters are:
| ~ | ! | @ | # | $ | % | ^ | & | * | ( | ) | _ | + | |
| ` | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 0 | - | = | |
| Q | W | E | R | T | Y | U | I | O | P | { [ | } ] | [[pipe | ]] \ |
| A | S | D | F | G | H | J | K | L | [[:]] | ; | " | ' | |
| Z | X | C | V | B | N | M | < | , | > | . | ? | American Standard Code for Information Interchange/ |
The characters in the above tables are all links. The goal is to create an article in Wikihack for every character. You can help: click a red link above and write an article. In the article, mention which monster or object that character represents, and what that key does from the keyboard. Try to link to other articles; for example, d should link to both dog and drop.
For technical reasons, we cannot use angle brackets, curly brackets, square brackets, hash marks, pipes, or plus signs in the names of articles. Also, an article name cannot contain only underscores, and it cannot consist of exactly one or two dots. Thus all of those articles (will) have words for names.
