Home and End in OSX

Here is a good tip for one of the things I find annoying in OSX:


Create a file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with this content:

/* Home/End keys like Windows */
{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* home */
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /* end */
"$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* shift home */
"$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* shift end */
}

Also:


"^\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfDocument:"; /* control + home */
"^\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfDocument:"; /* control + end */

3 Comments

  1. Nicholas Lee Said,

    March 3, 2005 @ 12:24 pm

    By normal I assume you mean PC. Apple-A and Apple-E probably works like Ctl-A and Ctl-E in Unix. Another thing I need to sort out is backspace and delete in consoles. Still its just the usual Unix keymap issues.

    Do you have any idea if there are any little apple symbols stickers I can get? Would be nice to have the special apple symbols stuck on Alt, Ctl and Win-Start buttons.

  2. silas Said,

    March 3, 2005 @ 7:28 pm

    Home and End on a Powerbook are [fn-left] and [fn-right], respectively. This is a great tip, for laptops especially.

    I must say, the home/end issue gets little notice in most switcher stories out there on the net, but I found it to be one of the hardest things to get used to when I switched. Of course it was made more difficult because there is very little consistency among 3rd-party apps in how the control, option and command keys modify the arrow keys. (MS Word is a big culprit here.)

    After a year on the platform though, I’ve gotten used to the Apple setup, and even find it more efficient. I particularly love using the up key as a substitute for home on the top line of a text field, and the down key as a substitute for end on the bottom line. When I use Windows machines I get really frustrated when it doesn’t work.

  3. Richard Parry Said,

    March 3, 2005 @ 10:19 pm

    Do you need to have some sort of normal keyboard for this? My Powerbook doesn't actually have home and end keys, and you need to do some wierd Apple-shift-control-widget to get it to work.

RSS feed for comments on this post