Keyboard Shortcuts For Interacting With Text Areas

When interacting with a document text area on MacOS (such as in the Notes app), there are a bunch of keyboard shortcuts made available to you via the operating system.

A couple common ones that I'm used to from Unix environments are:

• ctrl-a to move the cursor to the beginning of the line
• ctrl-e to move the cursor to the end of the line
• ctrl-p to move the cursor up a line (this is a common previous keybinding)
• ctrl-n to move the cursor down a line (this is a common next keybinding)

A handy one that I wasn't aware of is ctrl-l which will scroll the text area so that the cursor gets centered in the view area.

A much more niche one I wasn't aware of is ctrl-t which swaps the character before the cursor with the character after the cursor. I can only imagine this being useful for quickly fixing transposed characters in a misspelled word, e.g. baer.

There are many more Document Shortcuts as well as well as keyboard shorcuts for other apps and situations. The full listing is at Mac Keyboard Shortcuts.