Bonus: also try Ctrl+E (and Ctrl+A) in text fields, or on the command-line.
(Both of these carry over to iOS, if you’re curious. I just tested them with the iPad keyboard-folio thing.)
Interesting aside: the “Globe” key on an iPad keyboard-folio (the one that opens the IME chooser) has some but not all of the properties of an Fn key. Globe+Left and Globe+Right work as PgUp/PgDn, but Globe+Up and Globe+Down do not work as Home/End. (Or maybe they do, but Home/End just aren’t bound in any app I’ve tested? I don’t want to write+deploy an iOS keysym tester just to find this out...)
You can also plug in arbitrary USB keyboards, or pair arbitrary Bluetooth keyboards, to a Mac, and the Home/End keys on those will also do what you'd expect.
Apple just doesn't bother to put Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys on their laptops — presumably because they find that people don't need them very often; and that, when the keyboard's size is already constrained, people get more value out of fewer, larger keys (while requiring key-chords for some things) vs. more, smaller keys.
No, they don't. I expect pressing Home to go to the beginning of the line I am on, and I have to hit Command-Left for that, and Home does nothing of value.
e.g. ^A ^K to clear an input line
I use Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E all the time.
cmd-left/cmd-right go to beginning/end of the line.
It seems Word for Mac supports cmd-left/right but not cmd-up/down. Word also supports fn-left (home) and fn-right (end), and fn-opt-left does like ctrl+home on Windows.
Turns out the f12 key was the culprit; took me longer than it should have to realize she was describing the Firefox developer console.
Push, push-and-hold, and push multiple times quickly.
TIL Enter key toggles comment collapsing.
Just to pile on with fun new keyboard tricks! Caveat: "linux" here is largely specific to the Desktop environments I've worked with. 'Good terminals' refers to termianls that support emacs keybindings by default, which is the mac os terminal, and most linux bash/zsh terminals at least. I know Cygwin and Conemu respect this under normal usage too.
## Start and end of line:
- Mac: CMD + left, CMD + right
- Linux/PC: Home and End Buttons
- Linux/Mac/Good Terminals: ctrl+a ctrl+e
## "Word-wise" movement:
- Mac: option+left, option+right
- Linux/PC: alt+left, alt+right
- Good Terminals: alt+b, alt+f (mnemonic: 'back' and 'forward')
The 'shift' key can be added to any of the above to select whole words or lines, or parts of lines at a time. Combined with multiple insertion points you've got superpowers.
- Insert toggles between shifting characters after the cursor to the right and deleting the character to the right of the cursor, replacing it with the new character you typed, but not replacing a newline character. While eg. Caps Lock is global, Insert mode is local to the text input that currently has focus - tab or mouse over to a new window and you've lost Insert mode, tab back to the one where you previously set it and you're back to Insert mode.
- Delete is like Backspace, but deletes stuff to the right of the cursor.
- Home, as you discovered, moves browsers to the top of the page. When composing text, it moves the cursor to the start of the line (and vice versa with "End"), CTRL+Home moves to the start of the text entry box.
- Page Up and Page Down shift the cursor by screenfulls of text, typically leaving a couple lines at the top and bottom for context. Note to web developers who are unfamiliar with keyboards: Make sure your fixed/sticky header/footer banners don't hide content when using "Page Up" and "Page Down". Also of note, CTRL+Page Up/Down and CTRL+Tab/CTRL+Shift+Tab shift the window or tab focus within an application, for example to go to the next tab in Chrome or the next file in your IDE.
- Print Screen creates a screenshot. Depending on your setup, this may either go to your Pictures folder, or may go to the clipboard (open an image editor eg. Win+R, mspaint, and CTRL+V to paste). It shares a key with SysRq, which can be accessed with Alt+SysRq+(magic letter), and used to recover from various crash conditions - be careful, if you start hitting letters at random, you'll invoke the bad kind of magic that will shut down your computer.
- Scroll lock was used to stop auto-scrolling an input buffer that was running too fast. Largely neutered in modern OSes, it's still useful in the BIOS when all the hardware initialization messages are scrolling by too fast to read. Sometimes it's also used to toggle keyboard backlighting because it had an LED attached and doesn't have a real function anymore, but depending on the manner in which your OS/hardware neuters this key your keyboard backlighting may not work.
- Pause/Break kills a process like CTRL+C, but sometimes has different specific modes of operation in various debuggers. Access the "break" alternate function with CTRL+Pause.
- Super/Windows key opens the Start menu or search tool. On Macs, it's the Command key and used for lots of keyboard shortcuts. Hyper useful for window management, Super+arrow keys move screens to the left or right half of the monitor, maximize, resize, or minimize them, and Shift+Super+arrow moves them between multiple monitors.
- Num lock toggles between entering numbers with the 10-key section of the keyboard and that section's alternate navigation functions, where 7 is home, 1 is end, 9 is page up, 3 is page down, and 4/8/6/2 are left/up/right/down respectively. Not really important if you've got an inverted-T arrow cluster and Super useful on some dumb 17" laptops that cram in a 10-key section but relegate all these normal navigation keys to arcane random Function invocations on tiny distant buttons crammed into the top of the keyboard if they're present at all. Uniquely, Num Lock is typically remembered across reboots.
I haven't seen that or heard of it happening for probably 10-odd years now. Didn't realize it still worked in Windows 10!
Firefox has specific code to detect banners and reduce the Page Down distance. This code fails on new Twitter.
Today I know what Home/End keys do, because of a random comment on the internet.
Ahh, I see you're also trying your hand at sarcasm!
It's a key combo that requires two hands, for what on a regular keyboard is one finger.
Perhaps Mac people never hold a cup of coffee in their hand while using a computer?
Mac people expect their Butler to carefully hold the coffee cup for them and tilt it so they can take a sip.
Control-A: Move to the beginning of the line or paragraph.
Control-E: Move to the end of a line or paragraph.
Control-F: Move one character forward.
Control-B: Move one character backward.
Control-L: Center the cursor or selection in the visible area.
Control-P: Move up one line.
Control-N: Move down one line.
Control-O: Insert a new line after the insertion point.
Control-T: Swap the character behind the insertion point with the character in front of the insertion point.
I mean, not while using the keyboard, no. Typing is a two-handed activity.
The moment I learned my macbook didn’t have a home button I was searching for how to emulate that.
My home Apple keyboard has the Home button between Help and Page Up. Though, I will admit that keyboard is 2003ish. But I keep using it because it still has good action.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Keyboard#Apple_Keyboard_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_Pro_Keyboard_black....
I have to get a USB⇄USB-C dongle so I can use it on my Windows machine.
Here's where I disagree
Way too many people who have never used an actual console terminal
gg - go to top
G - go to bottom
You can also go anywhere on page (litterary) with single key (homework).
Much better then home/end as you usually need to hunt for those keys, or even use them with Fn modifier.
I sometimes install plugins myself if the code is open source and it is small enough for me to vet it.
I would love vimium, but the code is way too big to vet it myself.
I wish there was some party that is trustworthy, vets codebases like these and publish hashes of trusted versions.
An alternative would be more modular codebases. So instead of publishing a giant box of code with all kinds of vim-like behavior, publish lots of small ones. Like the code to make gg work.
If you want to fight for security on that level, your computer life must be miserable. You are also missing out a lot of great tools and are way less effective then folks that use them (and thus less competitive).
I am all up for great security in OS, emails, browsers, messangers etc, but it has to stop somewhere. Also, this kind of stuff like vimium is so widely used that somebody would probably notice if something funky is going on (everything leaves some traces, you dont really need to look at the code to notice it most of the time).
Your proposed way to solve this issue is way worse - now, instead of having one monolitic but still simple and well rounded app you have thousands of little scripts that combined are also hessle to review, belong to way more humans with different agendas (instead of single or couple) and would be horror to initialize (really sounds like nodejs ecosystem).
Just get the damn thing and relax a bit. Anything malicious that could be done by some developer is already done by big evil corps anyway (and more) and you cant really escape those.
Life is risky by default. You calculate your ods.
I often need to make bigger and smaller jumps with keyboard. In Sublime I use a plug-in that can jump 10 lines up and down but I also need that functionality across the rest of OS. For navigating menus, scrolling through content, moving around spreadsheet. Page up/down is too large jump with the amount of content that can fit modern screens.
(global-set-key [C-down] '(lambda () (interactive) (next-line 10) ))
(global-set-key [C-up] '(lambda () (interactive) (previous-line 10) ))I probably need a scriptable keyboard to make it work across all programs. Some keyboards support Lua, but I think it's only for LED patterns which is pretty retarded.
Sarcasm is definitely not impossible to detect in writing. You just to have to trust people and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Thinking about it some more, I was being driven in a friend's BMW one day and there was some bad smell coming from outside so I asked if I should press the air recirculation button. It turns out he'd had that car for more than five years and had never pressed that button. In fact, he'd never pressed, nor seemingly even wondered about, most of the buttons in the car. Strange.
It's very useful on web sites like HN, when you don't want to lose where you are in the thread, yet need to go back to the top to have a second look at the topic for instance.
I never use escape or any function keys either.
I still can’t figure out how to get in and out of insert mode in sublime text. When it happens I just quit and restart.
I’m starting to wonder why I tolerate this level of ignorance in myself.
I mean, I use key commands constantly. That’s what is odd about all this.
Not sure if joking, but you literally press the button labelled "Insert".
So you need to press Cmd+Up. Yes, it's two keys instead of one but I would argue it's actually quicker since they are both usually located on the bottom row, meaning there is less distance for your hand to travel.
- Home (and Fn + Up) don't move your caret if you're in an editing context, except...
- Some apps have different behavior for Home than go-to-top. Typically these exceptions use the Windows behavior of go-to-start-of-line (obviously this does move your cursor).
I just switched to OS X recently and I am definitely having the reverse trouble getting used to the Cmd/Alt+Arrow I almost never have problem finding Home/End on any keyboards (been using Windows/Linux for 15+ years). Nowadays for laptop it's almost always fn+Arrow for Home/End.
What do you mean some keyboards? Any PC keyboard you connect to the mac will support home, end, page up, etc. (Unlike buttons 4 and up on mice)
I use space all the time to scroll down on a web page, didn't know you could reverse direction, awesome :)
A tip: If it seems the whole world is a problem, it's probably not the world that is the problem.
Penny: Great! I hope I'm a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory for my whole life!
Sheldon: Was that sarcasm?
Penny: No.
Sheldon: Was that sarcasm?
Penny: Yes.
SaRcASm iS NeARlY ImpOsSibLe To dEtecT iN WrITiNg.
On iOS: double-tap the top bar
On Windows: use the home key
On Android: swipe your thumb a dozen times really quickly
Edit: Wow, I thought I was going the extra mile to make the joke obvious by saying the key should also take you to the beginning of a text line, but I guess it wasn't obvious enough for the first 3 commentators.