Welcome to the wonderful and obscure world of emacs key bindings. Yes,
little known to all but the most dedicated geeks, the MacOS supports
emac style key bindings to more the cursor about and do other weird
and wonderful things in text fields of programs from TextEdit to Mail.
The best part is you can customize this and add new ones as needed. To
do this create a text file in the following location:
~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBlindings.dict
That is in the Library directory of your home directory. Make sure the
file is named DefaultKeyBlindings.dict now cut and past the lines
below between the curly braces into that file and save it.
{
"^>" = "moveToEndOfDocument:";
"^<" = "moveToBeginningOfDocument:";
}
Now restart your text editing programs, Mail and so on. From now on
when you press Control-> you will go to the end of the document and
when you press Control-< you will go to the beginning of the document.
There are tons of cool things you can do with this. You can also screw
up your computer big time as well so be carful!
Here are some keybinding to try out:
End of Text Control-V
StartOfLine: Control-A
EndOfLine: Control-E
LineUp: Control-P
LineDown: Control-N
CharLeft: Control-B
CharRight: Control-F
Delete CharRight Control-D
Delete CharLeft Control-H
Cut all text to the right of the insertion point on the current line
Control-K (This is not the same as Command-X)
Open a new line at the insertion point Control-O
Paste text from Control-K Control-Y
Move down a line selecting as you do so Control-Shift-N
Move up a line selecting as you do so Control-Shift-P
Other movement key will select with Shift down as well.
For those who really want to know more you should read:
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html
Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Mar 8, 2008, at 3:23 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi Tiffanitsa,
You wrote:
I have trouble, in Text edit, getting to the beginning and to the end
of documents. I don't know if I'm hitting the wrong command or what.
Btw, I'm using a Macbook, so I don't have keys like home and end.
To move to the beginning of a document on your MacBook use
VO-keys-FN-shift-left arrow. To move to the end of a TextEdit
document
use VO-keys-FN-shift right arrow.
For general information on all these navigation commands, I'm
going to point you to Tim Kilburn's web page. Here's the
description of TextEdit:
http://homepage.mac.com/kilburns/voiceover/textedit.html
Look through the list of VO Commands in TextEdit for information
about reading through by sentence, paragraph, word, line, character,
beginning and end of text in visitble window and in scrolling window,
setting bookmarks and more.
For your MacBook, look for the description that says, "On a
laptop . . ."
This page also covers items like setting tabs, selecting text, and
spell checking, and will probably answer many of the questions
you haven't had a chance to ask yet <smile>.
HTH,
Cheers,
Esther
