NSTextField Shortcuts

February 18, 2005 - 3:27pm

After having hit a few keys I expected to work and, to my surprise, they did, here’s a list of what shortcuts you get in Mac OS X’s standard NSTextField object (which is to say, Mac OS 9 shortcuts combined with a subset of emacs shortcuts):

↑	CTL-O	Move to the previous line
↓	CTL-N	Move to the next line
←	CTL-B	Move to the previous character
→	CTL-F	Move to the next character
OPT-←	Move to the start of the current or previous¹ word
OPT-→	Move to the end of the current or next¹ word
OPT-↑	CTL-A	Move to the start of the current or previous¹ paragraph
OPT-↓	Move to the end of the current or next¹ paragraph
CMD-←	CTL-←	Move to the start of the line
CMD-→	CTL-→	Move to the end of the line
CMD-↑	Move to the start of the document
CMD-↓	CTL-V	Move to the end of the document
SHIFT + anything	Select while moving
Delete	CTL-H²	Delete the previous character
Forward delete³	CTL-D	Delete the next character
OPT-Delete	Delete previous word
OPT-Forward Delete	Delete next word
CTL-K	Cut from insertion point to the end of the line
CTL-T	Transpose the characters around the insertion point
CMD-V	CTL-Y	Paste
Return	CTL-O	New paragraph

If you never use the Option key for writing international text, you can also drop a file in your Library to add meta-key shortcuts to mimic emacs more fully. You can, of course, hack the file to add your own shortcuts to all programs that use this kind of text field (most of them).

¹ Control-key shortcuts do not operate on next/previous items, only command/option shortcuts do.

² Technically, these are the same thing to the computer.

³ On portables, fn+Delete is forward delete.