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Comment by archangel_one | Hacker News Reader

I think some of the points are valid; there may be solutions but they are so obscure that people obviously never discover them. I've had a MBP for nearly a year now and never knew that Fn+Left/Right substituted for Home/End (thanks for the tip, btw). I can't see myself guessing Cmd+Shift+G to type paths into Finder either... They're valid solutions but normally Linux is (not unjustifiably) castigated for requiring obscure wizardry to do things, I don't see why OSX should get away with it either.

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Actually, I liked text manipulations shortcuts in native text input fields. They are very consistent and easy to get used to.

Option (Alt) means "word". Opt+Left — move one word left, Opt+Right — move one word right.

Cmd means "all". Cmd+left — move to beginning of line, Cmd+right — move to the end of line, Cmd+up — move to the beginning of the text, Cmd+down — move to the end of text.

PgDown/PgUp/Home/End mean the same thing as in other systems, but without moving the cursor. All this might be a little frustrating at first, but it's muscle memory and you can figure the logic out in a couple of days. Don't fight the system, embrace it.

As for cmd+shift+g, you can look these shortcuts up in the menu, if you are not sure where to look, use help/search, type go to and the top item will be what you are thinking about. That said, finder still sucks.

I can only imagine you were downvoted by accident...

As a relatively recent Mac convert, the whole "Option (Alt)" thing still gets me. I regularly see shortcut hints and then have to sit there for a few seconds thinking "Which one's the Option key again?"

The confusion is in part perpetuated by Apple, who can't seem to make up their mind on the matter.

My UK MacBook Pro keyboard has "alt" and doesn't mention "option" at all. They have also shipped keyboards that just say option (no mention of alt). Many of their keyboards have both printed on them.

In most of their user-facing documentation it is referred to as the "Option" key. In Cocoa, it is the "Alternate" key.

The menus don't mention either: they use the ⌥ symbol. Which is on some, but not all of their keyboards.

One handy thing is that because OS X uses Command for most of its window-management and application hot-keys, control + key is almost always unmasked by the application. Why is this important? Control-A and Control-E work in almost any text input! They work in Adium, they work in Chrome for the location bar and this textarea, and I'm sure many others.

I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.

All native text inputs support Emacs keybindings. The only rub is that you need to use Ctrl + Option to Meta.

To me I think of it as Bash bindings, because that is where I learned them. For text editing I've been using vim bindings, but I never found the vim mode to work quite like I want it to on the terminal. I should look into that more.

I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.

Linux maybe. I have never had it fail in windows and think you may be misremembering how it works.

I mean they mask control-A to select all instead of moving the cursor to the beginning of the line.

That's because control-A is supposed to select all on Windows.

They work in every Cocoa text field. Ctrl-[abefnp] ... not sure if I missed any. Those are the ones I use daily.

Yeah, the only reason I knew about Fn-arrows was because my old MacBook actually labelled them: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/15837.jpg For some reason the labels are not part of the new design (no numeric keypad emulation either). I guess they thought it was too busy a design?

It’s no less obscure than other operating systems in this regard. I can’t see the difference.

Are you sure? On a windows box, there's a key with "End" written on it. Much more guessable than fn+right arrow.

End? What does that mean? Does it quit the current app? Does it shutdown? I’m really confused! And this strange Home key, what’s that for? Going to my start page? Showing the desktop? Start menu? What’s going on?!

It's pretty easy to push a key and find out what it does compared to imagining a key combination and trying to figure if that key combination even does anything

Not only that but, as a new mac user, it seems like there are several common keystroke types. Fn+x, ctrl+x, alt+x, cmd+x, cmd+shift+x; maybe there's some logic behind it but i can't find any. It seems like the windows system is a bit more understandable.

(if there's something obvious that i'm missing someone please tell me!)

Cmd: this is an important command we expect you to use a lot.

Shift-cmd: wow this program has a lot of commands that people want shortcuts for.

Shift-ctrl/alt: holy shit this program has a lot of commands.

Shift-ctrl-alt: this program is probably old enough to vote, and has a huge ton of commands

Alt: rarely used alone outside of terminal

Ctrl: see alt

Fn: NOT ON ALL KEYBOARDS. Used to force f-keys to output f-key codes instead of doing media control stuff, or to change cursors into page-up/dn/start/end.

That’s typical Windows chauvinism.

I think learning that 'end' means 'end of document' is a lot more intuitive than fn+right.

The canonical shortcuts are Cmd-left/right/up/down, which move the cursor to the absolute left, right, top, and bottom of the document, respectively. This makes perfect sense.

Home and End behave differently, they move the viewport to the beginning or end of the document but do not move the cursor. They are like scrolling in that you don't lose your position. I'm not sure, but I think that page up and down (Fn-up and Fn-down) behave similarly. I never use these though.

They way I learned it is, I pushed it to see what happened. Voila, it means end of line.

There are home and end keys on a full-size Mac keyboard, too. They're not there on the compact keyboard layout, but many Windows laptops have home/end mapped to other keys, as well. Granted, that's usually is indicated on the keys, whereas it's not on the Mac, but you still have to go hunting for them the first time you need them and one time is all it takes to learn their location.

...those home and end keys unfortunately don't take you to the beginning or end of a line like on Windows or Linux...they take you to the top/bottom of the document! one of the more painful parts of my switching process was un-training myself to hit home to get to the beginning of a line (these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis)...you're almost better off without having those keys.

Late to this, but...

> these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis

That isn't true. OS X actually has a very powerful and easy-to-use (but NOT easy-to-discover) method of controlling key bindings, and it applies instantly to ALL Cocoa applications (which, now that Finder and iTunes are Cocoa, means every common GUI application except Firefox).

This isn't my link, but here is an excellent site that describes the Cocoa text system:

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System....

And, if you're interested, here is the DefaultKeyBindings file that i've use on every OS X-based Mac i've ever had to fix Apple's default Home/End/PgUp/PgDn implementation:

https://github.com/ohkine/configs/blob/master/KeyBindings/De...

Funny, on older Macs it was written on the key. It's so ingrained now that I hadn't really noticed they'd taken it off.

The issue there is that coming from a Windows environment the terminology isn't exactly the same. The command is called "go", hence Cmd + Shift + G.

It would be useful if one could enter keystrokes into the search bar in the 'Help' panel. That would solve a lot of keystroke identification issues and familiarize them with OS X fairly quickly.

It is wizardry because it is baked into the OS that people will use the mouse or they will dive in and learn the incantations.

What to go to the end of a line? Click there. FWIW, I prefer ctrl-e and the other emacs bindings myself.

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