Question

I’ve switched over to a Mac recently and, although things have been going quite well, the very different text-editing behaviours across applications is driving me insane.

Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, Apple-arrow, Ctrl-arrow, alt-arrow etc. quite often do different things depending on the application.

Is there a way to standardise this behaviour?

Answer 1

There are standards, but they are not based around what you’re used to from windows. It drove me mad until I got over myself and decided to learn what the actual standards were. Since then I’ve been sold.

The ones I use:

• Command–Left/Right – Jump to start/end of line
  • Can also do this with ctrl–a/e which is great if you’re used to ssh

• Command–Up/Down – Jump to top/bottom of text field or document

• Option–Left/Right – Jump to start/end of word or previous/next word

These basically replace home/end/pgup/pgdown, and ctrl–left/right from the windows world.

I find this to be a massive win due to the fact I have a macbook pro and almost no laptops have proper home/end/pgup/pgdown keys – not needing them in OSX is a godsend

Here’s a big list of the rest of them