Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about some keyboard commands you should
know if you write or edit text on your Mac. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great
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Now lots of people love to use keyboard shortcuts for things. But not everybody. Some people prefer
to use the mouse or trackpad to get things done. A lot of times this has to do with
what you're doing on your Mac. For instance if you're manipulating graphics or objects
on the screen using the mouse or trackpad it can be inconvenient to switch your hands to
the keyboard to use a keyboard shortcut. But on the other hand if you're typing,
so you already have your fingers on the keyboard, then it makes sense to use some keyboard commands
there to move around in your text rather than having to switch one hand to a mouse or trackpad.
So here I am in Pages. But this should work in all sorts of different apps. For
instance like TextEdit or in Mail or even in filling out forms on the web. Now of course
there are tons of keyboard commands in the Menu Bar. A lot of them have to do
with working with text. For instance in the Edit Menu you've got Cut, Copy, and Paste. In
the Format Menu you've got things like Bold, Italic, Underline, and so on. I'm not really
talking about those in particular. I'm talking about actually moving the text cursor around.
Now the Text Cursor is that blinking line you see to the left of the first character here.
Usually it's black but in Pages the default color is this orange. A lot of people use
the terms cursor and pointer interchangeably. Technically this blinking line inside of text
is the cursor. The arrow that you move around with your mouse or trackpad is the pointer.
As we type the cursor will stay to the right side of the text showing it's exactly where
the next character will go. But we can move it around if you use the mouse or trackpad.
Notice here now I've got the pointer here. It's an arrow. But if I move it over text it changes
to this other shape that shows me that if I click somewhere it will reposition
the text cursor. So this is a case of the pointer and the cursor working together.
But you don't need to actually use the mouse or trackpad at all to move the text cursor around.
Instead you can use the Arrow Keys on your keyboard. The simplest example is to use the
right arrow key to move the text cursor one character to the right. You can, of course,
use the left arrow key to move it one character to the left. If you hold it down it will move
by itself. You don't have to keep tapping. But it will do so very slowly. As a matter of fact
even tapping very quickly with your finger will take a while to get you to the next word
or line. Now you can use the Up and Down Arrows as well. Going down will take you to the closest
text cursor position right underneath where you were. So you can continue to move down,
like that, and move Up as well. So this makes it a little quicker to get somewhere.
But this is where knowing more advanced commands comes in handy. If you really want to move around
quickly in your text you probably want to do it by word not by character. To do that just
hold down the Option Key and then use the right or left Arrow Keys and notice that
the text cursor will always go to the end of the next word. So you can quickly jump
forward by word or backward with the left arrow key. If you use the Option Key with
the down arrow it jumps to the end of the current paragraph. You can see it jumping there at the end
of that paragraph. If I use it again it will jump to the end of the next paragraph and so
on. You can use the Option and Up Arrow Key to jump to the beginning of each paragraph.
So just by using the Option Key you can move very quickly through large amounts of text.
Now another modifier key that works with the arrow keys is the Command Key. If I hold down Command
and use the Right Arrow Key it goes to the end of the current line of text. So you can see it go
there. If I use it again it just will stay there. Command and left arrow will go to the start of the
current line of text. So I can go to a line like this and if I want to jump to the end, Command
Right Arrow will do it for me. Now Command and Down Arrow will jump to the end of the document.
Command Up Arrow will jump to the beginning of the document. It may be not so useful when composing
a long book but very useful when working with a smaller piece of text like a posting or an email.
Now in addition to moving around you could also select text using just the keyboard. The modifier
key to use for that is the Shift Key. You can use this with the Arrow keys. If I hold Shift down
and go to the right with the Right Arrow Key, notice it is not just moving the text cursor,
it is actually increasing the selection to the right. If I just use the right arrow key by
itself now it releases the selection and now I just have the cursor there that I'm moving
around. I could use Shift and the Left Arrow Key to increase the selection to the left. If
I go with Shift Right Arrow you could see how there is a cursor there. You just don't see
it and I'm actually increasing or decreasing the selection. If I go all the way here to the right
you could see it will increase it to the right and so on. So you can work with text to select
some. Once you have text like this selected you could, of course, use other keyboard commands
like Command X for Cut, Command C for Copy, and Command V for Paste for working with that text.
Of course another thing you can do once you have something selected is simply replace it. So I'll
do Shift Option Right Arrow to select this entire word. Then I can just start typing and
it replaces what is there. You can also combine the Option and Shift keys to select by word. So,
Option Shift and to the right I'm selecting by word, I can select large
pieces of text very quickly. Option Shift and Down Arrow will do it by paragraph.
Another one I want to mention that's in the Edit Menu here is Select All, simply because so many
people don't seem to use this. So if you want to select All your text, again not useful in maybe
a book, but very useful in a shorter piece of text that you're writing, Command A just
selects everything. Now you can apply changes to it, Copy it, Delete it, Replace it, etc.
Now you can also use the fn key or Globe key on your keyboard with the arrow keys. But it
doesn't actually work with the text cursor, it's working with Scrolling. So, if I were to use the
fn and right arrow key it scrolls to the end. It's the equivalent to the end key that's on
larger keyboards. fn and left arrow scrolls to the beginning. fn down is the equivalent to Page Down
and fn and Up is equivalent to Page Up. Notice that none of these change the position of the text
cursor. They just scroll like using two fingers on your trackpad or on the surface of your mouse.
Now speaking of deleting. Say you wanted to delete some characters. Usually you
would position the text cursor right after the character you want deleted. Then press
the Delete Key on your keyboard. But if you ever want to do the opposite and delete what
is in front of the text cursor you can do that. It's called a Forward Delete.
You can do it by holding the fn or Globe Key and pressing delete. That will delete forward.
There are also some more obscure commands for doing this. Using Control and D will Delete
the next character. Whereas using Control and H will delete the previous character.
Now those are actually holdovers from older text editing apps that predate computers using things
like mice and trackpads. There are a whole bunch of other ones that are supported pretty widely in
situations on your Mac when you edit text. Here's a list of them in order of increasing strangeness.
They're good to know about but in general most things that you can do, you can do using arrow
keys and modifiers. So get comfortable using these modifiers and arrow keys if you like to edit text
and would rather keep your hands on the keyboard the entire time instead of having to move to the
mouse or trackpad to reposition the text cursor. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.