With the key-combos below, you can move the cursor just like the arrow keys, but better because you don’t have to move your hands from the home row. This makes typing way faster because your hands don’t have to move, and you don’t have to look down to find them. These key combinations work in most Apple text editors. These do not work in Windows XP, just Mac OS X.

Control+f = Forward (right arrow)
Control+b = Back (left arrow)
Control+p = previous line (up arrow)
Control+n = next line (down arrow)

Another one that often works in programs is:

Control+d = forward delete (delete from the middle set of keys)

If you want near complete control of the cursor with out moving your hands from the home row, on any operating system, Emacs is the best text editor to use. That is where these shortcuts come from, but Emacs has many, many more. It has a steep learning curve if you aren’t a coder (which I am not), but it allows you to move one space, word, sentence or paragraph forward or back with Control and Alt key combos, and they’re pretty easy to remember.

Give it a try, but do yourself a favor and start by reading the tutorial. This one’s a bugger to learn on your own.

But Emacs is already on your Mac, sans the tutorial. If you are feeling really daring, go to the Applications folder, select the Utilities folder and open Terminal. Once you have Terminal open, and just type

emacs

and hit return. Terminal becomes Emacs. The same goes for the other popular editors like Vi, Vim and Pico. Just type their names in all lowercase letters. By the way, Windows users, these didn’t work for me in XP, sorry again. It is better to just download the program because it’s free.

This works in my current favorite word processors such as Pages ‘08, TextEdit and Write Room. By the way, Pages ‘08 is incredible – way better than Word. Let me use it for a bit and I’ll post a review for you.

Well, that’s it for now, later.