Indeed

Things that seemed important enough at the time

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Selecting words

I don't know why I'm compelled to write this tonight, but here we are.
(these tips apply to Cocoa apps - I'm too lazy to bother trying it in Carbon apps, since I don't use many)

Some of the best time saving tricks I've learned in the past few years have been for selecting entire words. At some point quite a while ago, I didn't know that you could move the cursor a word at a time by holding down option while pressing the left and right arrow keys. I'm not sure how I ever lived without it.

Everyone probably knows that you can select a word by double-clicking it, but if you don't release the second click and drag - you then select things by word. I probably use this more than any other type of selection now, since it works so well for programming and dealing with URLs (it was always difficult to get the location field of browsers to select the correct part of the URL... usually I would miss the leading 'h'). It doesn't really work with links in a webpage though, for obvious reasons.

OK, I'm finished being a text nerd for the night - what's your favorite text navigation tip?

1 Comments:

  • At 12:07 PM, August 11, 2005, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    You could have added that shift-option actually selects word by word.

    And yes, once you've discovered these shortcuts, there's no way back.

     

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