One extra random feature of Mac OS X that I am afraid many people don’t know about is its pre-configured support for emacs key-bindings. These only work in Cocoa applications, but fortunately that means most applications today. Sorry Firefox. A few keyboard shortcuts for text navigation can really speed up usage. When I read today:

Secret shortcuts. Hidden helpers. Mysterious menus. You could spend months tracking down all the undocumented features tucked away in Mac OS X 10.4, Apple‘s newest operating system. But chances are, you’re too busy using Tiger for more-important tasks—such as doing your job. So Macworld sent in a team of specially trained spies to uncover Tiger’s deepest, darkest secrets.

Tiger Secrets Declassified [Macworld]

I thought “Woa, somebody beat me to posting about this at such a random time!” Then I read the article and unfortunately none of the tips that were important to me made it.

I will outline some of the shortcuts I recommend using:

• Ctrl-A : Jump to beginning of line
• Ctrl-E : Jump to end of line
• Ctrl-K : Cut from cursor to end of line (useful for delete)
• Ctrl-Y : Paste that test you just cut

Also, hold Option and select text in Tiger on multiple lines for this cool box-selection thing, where the cursor will turn in to a cross-hair and select just the contents of the box, not the whole line.

you can also type bindkey in a terminal for a complete list:

joey% bindkey
"^@" set-mark-command
"^A" beginning-of-line
"^B" backward-char
"^D" delete-char-or-list
"^E" end-of-line
"^F" forward-char
[continued....]

I realize there are many customizations possible, and more to this– but if you are interested you should check out Mac OS X Hints and do some searching. Now you know its possible.

(I know this post was egregiously unnecessary and somewhat offtopic. I just wanted to show off some new formatting stuff I hooked up in the CSS last night.)