Standardised text editing behaviour across Mac applications

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

Answer 2

OK, now I'm beginning to see I was wasting my time with the Home, Page Up etc. keys!

Thanks for that.

Answer 3

Annoyingly, there still seems to be some issues on certain applications.

Dreamweaver CS3 doesn't have quite the same text-editing behaviour, nor does Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac.

Very annoying!

Answer 4

And what's funny (and frustrating!) is that the Microsoft OS X apps (e.g. Entourage) use the Windows standards.

I develop on WinXP during the day but have an iMac at home, so it's confusing enough trying to switch modes between work and home. But then I have to remember if I'm writing an e-mail in Entourage, I need to revert back to Windows mode.

I can't think of any good reason why MS wouldn't follow the OS X keyboard standards...