Comments on: Mac OS X Home and End Keys

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:50:53 +0000

Thank you very much! I love it!

By: Larry

Larry — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:46:55 +0000

check out #66. Mitchell’s KBE actually works!!!! Finally – I get the expected response to and End and Home key that I want/expect. Thank you so much!

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:55:57 +0000

It’s just Shift + Apple Key + Left Arrow = Selects everything to Home
It’s just Shift + Apple Key + Right Arrow = Selects everything to End

By: mitchell

mitchell — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:32:42 +0000

@Ted (comment 54)
The arrow keys are out of the way just as much as the home or end keys. Anything that can’t be pressed while staying over the home row is out of the way. Vi enthusiasts (not me) could easily call your method the “Wrong Way” and they probably kill you on productivity. Besides, I would say that since you are already moving your hand off the home row for the damn arrow keys that having to use one in combination with a modifier key (CMD) makes it more work than the single-key approach of home or end.

Ah, that takes care of my urge to comment to folks who’ll never be back around see the reply.

For any other folks interested in changing up some key bindings on you mac there’s a handy GUI program for doing so here:
http://www.cocoabits.com/KeyBindingsEditor/

By: PiEp

PiEp — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:09:56 +0000

Definitely works in Snow Leopard. This was driving me nuts, but this tip fixed it. Thanks!

By: Cool Person

Cool Person — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:18:55 +0000

The behaviour of the home and end keys are by FAR the most annoying “feature” of OS X. I constantly hit them by mistake while coding when I want to press page up or down, and this drives me crazy to no end. Option + Home/End should be the default keybinding to reach the top or bottom, imo.

By: rich

rich — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:51:27 +0000

James, james, james….

This is the standard BIOS functionality here.
Home/End are supposed to work on the line. That other is MAC for ‘think differently’ IE WORK differently. I like the way the BIOS functions, thank you.

Page up/down are supposed to scroll, which of course is limited in a console.

Its the fact that mac has always had this non-standard behavior that drives me nuts.And that Apple META instead of CTRL-V for paste needs to be fixed.Apple keys should map to the rest of the standards,too.

Linux does it right.Its not a ‘windows’ issue. Its a standards issue. Apple doesn’t care for the set ANSI standard, that’s all.I don’t care about the display portion of it because its a pain to code and ugly.I prefer doing it right the first time.

By: Alex D

Alex D — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:50:17 +0000

Customization is everything here ! Doesn’t matter if you like it or not, but don’t force users to conform to what Apple thinks is good. There’s nothing more annoying than a piece of sw that some developer thought it would be smart than you.
As for the behavior of these keys, for those of you who are not around for some time, the behavior to begin and end of documents has always been CRTL-HOME and CTRL-END combo (or whatever freaky key apple decided to use).

For the frustrated people, there may be another path which is using xmodmap to change the keys mappings. Experiment by yourself. I have remapped several so I would keep my sanity when using Xcode.

In time: xmodmap -pke diskays the current mappings.

By: BDP

BDP — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:19:14 +0000

Thanks, I’ve been slowly accepting Mac OSX. For the most partOSX is great, but little odd ball things like the strange NON STANDARD behavior is frustrating and genuinely make it near impossible to work on as a developer that must use multiple environments.

There are numerous easy ways to quickly scroll to the top / bottom of the document, using the mouse, scroll bars, wheel, keyboard shortcuts. “Home” and “End” are the accepted standard way to move the the home and end of a line. Changing the behavior just makes OSX that much more proprietary. It certainly seems like uncle Steve being obnoxious, as I can see absolutely no benefit to the end user what so ever.

I know I need to jump to the start/end of a line A LOT more often than jumping to the beginning / end of a document. As a programmer using native OSX applications for coding / text editing is virtually useless to me. So much so that I end up launching all my development tools on via an X session.

By: Making the Home and End Keys work in Eclipse 3.4 on Apple Mac OSX - Rob@Rojotek

Making the Home and End Keys work in Eclipse 3.4 on Apple Mac OSX - Rob@Rojotek — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:30:14 +0000

[...] in the comments of the article of Starry Hope – Mac Home and End Keys are some instructions for how to make the home and end keys work well as begin and end line in [...]