May 1 2011
Secret Shortcuts For Editing Text In Mac OS X
Most people know the keyboard shortcuts to copy, paste and cut text on a Mac. There are however many other little known key combinations that can really improve your productivity.
Below are some of the lesser known and undocumented shortcuts for editing text.
Control + D - Deletes the word to the right of the cursor.
Control + A - Moves the cursors position to the beginning of a paragraph.
Control +E - Moves the cursor to the end of a paragraph..
Control + K - Deletes all text to the right of the cursor until the end of a line.
Control + O - Inserts a hard return (paragraph break) leaving the cursor in its original position.
Control + T - This shortcut moves the cursor right by one character while also dragging the letter to the left with it.
Option + Delete - This deletes the word to the left of the cursor, a handy shortcut if you have just made a typo.
Control + F / Control + B - This moves the cursor one character to the right or to the left.
Control + N / Control + P - This moves the cursor up one line or down one line.
If you know of any other little known shortcuts for editing text please let me know in the comments.
Jun 18, 2011 @ 00:35:04
Hi i really love your post and find them very helpful. Thank you very much for your tips. I tried. It has started to work.
Aug 20, 2011 @ 04:03:23
Hi!, Thank you very much. I just migrated to Mac and was wondering about these very shortcuts. Am really glad you know of them and shared them here.
Cheers!
Siva Kishan
Aug 24, 2011 @ 13:11:18
Hi, is there any way to move the cursor faster when working on text? The one thing I really miss from PC (and what I am remedied of every time I use someone else’s) is how fast their arrow buttons make the cursor wiz across text passages. My friend told me how to make the cursor skip entire words instead of single spaces (hold down the alt-key too) but this takes up another finger, and the cursor is less visible (as it moves at different speeds, depending on the length of consecutive words). This may sound like a little hair-splitting thing, but it really bugs me. The only important work I ever do on my computer is write. So I don’t want to accept that this Macbook pro (super-machine) can’t let me adjust the arrow speed. Especially since anyone can adjust the speed of the mouse curser on any pc or mac.
can you help?
sorry for the rant
Aug 30, 2011 @ 18:31:38
These are emacs keybindings and they are only implemented in Cocoa applications. That means in apps like Firefox they don’t work, as they are using their own text-handling routines rather than using Apple’s.
As for Elvis’ question, the answer is to be found in the System Preferences, in the Keyboard Preference Pane.
Oct 11, 2011 @ 11:55:33
Just to clarify Elvis’s question as I had the same problem:
Within the keyboard pane in the system preferences, there should be a slider that says “key repeat.” Set that to the fastest setting. (I didn’t realize this applied to the arrow keys as well, so that’s why I was stumped before.)