“If you do a lot of writing on your Mac, here are a bunch of tips to help you type and manipulate text more efficiently,” Gary Rosenzweig writes for MacMost.
“You can use the arrow keys along with modifiers to move around and select text without taking your fingers off the keyboard,” Rosenzweig writes. “You can also quickly delete words and lines without using your mouse or trackpad.”
Rosenzweig writes, “You can complete and correct spelling, substitute a few keystrokes for longer pieces of text, and type accent marks and symbols quickly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Another timesaver:
Highlight any text, right-click anywhere within the highlighted area, and choose Transformations to make what you’ve highlighted upper case, lower case, or capitalized.
Main thing is don’t use any recent Mac Book Pro for your typing as you only hasten the day it no longer works in the near future.
I’m on my third MacBook Air. I’m about to change it for a fourth. Even writing this sentence resulted in three instances of a double-letter.
The MacBook keyboards are one of the worst missteps of Apple.
Don’t forget the app “Karabiner-Elements” to turn your nearly useless pipe/backslash key (under the delete key) on your MacBook or MacBook Pro into a dedicated forward-delete key. I type all day long on my MBP and I would be lost without this tweak. The app lets you transform a bajillion other keys, too, as you like! (No kickbacks here or connections—just a happy fan.)
Also:
Command-Option C and Command-Option V will let you copy and paste styles in your document.
Shift-Option-Command V will paste and match style.
Shift-Option Dash will give you an em-dash “—” sometimes used as a double-dash which is the width of a capital M, and Option-Dash will give you an en-dash, which is a broader dash the width of a capital N. Both are longer than a normal dash.
Control-Command Spacebar will let you choose Emoticons, which is also useful if you want symbols like ⓷, ⤴, and 🎶.
Those are my favorite keyboard tricks! What are yours?
My favorite “keyboard trick” is an app — TypeIt4Me.
So bzty plus return expands into my standard business “thank you” email, and so on for dozens of shortcuts like that, for frequently used text. I use it throughout the day, every day.