Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Graphical Text Editors

Aqua’s default text view, found in nearly every Cocoa application that involves text entry, is laden with a wide and predictable range of features. For a core OS service, the standard Aqua textbox gives you some fairly sophisticated editing tools.

First of all, there’s a myriad of undocumented keystrokes you can use to quickly move your cursor around, besides the obvious use of the arrow keys, or the even more obvious (and time-consuming) use of the mouse. These have been variously cribbed from Microsoft Word, NeXTSTEP, and even the Emacs text editor. (In this table, a “line” means a single row of text as it appears in the window, and a “paragraph” means any number of rows, bound on either end by either a hard carriage return or the start or end of the text area.)

Key command	Action
- ← Control- ←	Move the cursor to the beginning of the line.
- →, Control- →	Move the cursor to the end of the line.
Control-A	Move the cursor to the start of the paragraph.
Control-E	Move the cursor to the end of the paragraph.
Option-↑	Move the cursor up one paragraph.
Option-↓	Move the cursor down one paragraph.
Option- →	Move the cursor right one word.
Option- ←	Move the cursor left one word.
Control-D	Delete the character to the right of the cursor. ...