The Skinny: PC version “Shift-Down Arrow” = Mac version “Shift-CMD-Right Arrow” (or Left)
I’m still adapting to using a Mac after a loooooooong time on PCs. Every now and then I come across something that’s so reflexive, I can’t believe it’s not the same in both types of machines.
The latest realization is that the keyboard shortcuts / commands for navigating and highlighting text are different. Sure, any PC to Mac person rapidly discovers that “delete” only works backwards and there’s no backspace key. If you want to delete from left to right, you need to hit FN-Delete.
I’ve been aggravated that my old PC standard of highlighting the rest of a line of text from my cursor’s insertion point (Shift-Down Arrow) seemed to highlight an arbitrarily large amount of text that was well beyond just the end of the line.
Finally I’ve come across the Mac equivalents of cursor deployment! The following comes from the Wayne State University website’s handy “Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts:”
- Shift-Command-Right Arrow Select text between the insertion point and the end of the current line (*)
- Shift-Command-Left Arrow Select text between the insertion point and the beginning of the current line (*)
- Shift-Right Arrow Extend text selection one character to the right (*)
- Shift-Left Arrow Extend text selection one character to the left (*)
- Shift-Command-Up Arrow Select text between the insertion point and the beginning of the document (*)
- Shift-Command-Down Arrow Select text between the insertion point and the end of the document (*)
- Shift-Up Arrow Extend text selection to the line above, to the nearest character boundary at the same horizontal location (*)
- Shift-Down Arrow Extend text selection to the line below, to the nearest character boundary at the same horizontal location (*)
- Shift-Option-Right Arrow Extend text selection to the end of the current word, then to the end of the following word if pressed again (*)
- Shift-Option-Left Arrow Extend text selection to the beginning of the current word, then to the beginning of the following word if pressed again (*)
- Shift-Option-Down Arrow Extend text selection to the end of the current paragraph, then to the end of the following paragraph if pressed again (*)
- Shift-Option-Up Arrow Extend text selection to the beginning of the current paragraph, then to the beginning of the following paragraph if pressed again (*)
- Control-Space Toggle between the current and previous input sources
- Option-Control-Space Toggle through all enabled input sources
