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Inspired by a previous post titled Stupid OS X Keyboard Tricks, I’ve decided to mention a few that I use almost everyday, but are not the most obvious. All of these should work on native applications, but you may have limited success with some third party.

Home and End

For those of you who may be used to the Windows environment, you may also be used to hitting home or end to get to the beginning or end of a line of text. You’ll notice that most Mac keyboard have these same ‘home’ and ‘end’ buttons, but they really do not seem to do what you want.

There are many keyboard fixing applications out there that you can install to fix this, but there’s an easier way – use ctrl-a for ‘home’ and ctrl-e for ‘end’. When I first learned this trick, I thought I would never use it, after all I made it this far without them, but once I got used to it, I found it’s invaluable for getting back to writing after having to edit a typo earlier in my sentence.

Letter Switch

Speaking of typos, I make them all the time. My most common typo is switching letters around; such as, “teh.” Luckily there is a keyboard command for that too. Take “teh” for example, if you place your typing cursor between the ‘e’ and ‘h’ in “teh” then press ctrl-t the ‘e’ and ‘h’ switch places and you now have the word “the”

So those are the keyboard tricks, go ahead and try them a couple of times, I think you’ll find situations for these commands come up more often than you would expect.