Why don't the home/end keys on macs work like they should?

[spaceballl]

Okay so I switched a few years back from the PC world to the joint mac/pc world... One thing that i've never been able to figure out, and hopefully someone here knows how to fix it, is that when i'm at the end of a line on a PC, I can hold down shift, and push home, and that whole line will highlight. On my mac, home and end really have no function... am I doing something wrong? Is there some setting to make these keys behave a bit more PC like?
-Kevin

 

[fwhh]

At the end of the line try pressing
ctrl+shift+(left-key)
That should do it.
Pressing Shift+Home (on PB: Shift+fn+(left-key)) will select everything between the cursor pos and the top of the document.

 

[stubeeef]

Won't clicking on the line 3 times highlight the line?

two clicks on a word to highlight the word, 3rd mouse click the entire line.

 

[bbarnhart]

This drives me nuts too. What used to drive me super nuts with Mac OS 9 was when you would select text with shift+arrow, but you selected too much and pressed the other arrow key to make it smaller, it would keep the current selected text and then expand it on the other end.

Mac OS X does not do this. Now it works the same as Windows. And, they finally got the del key (under the help key - not the delete key) to do the backwards delete.

You can also move from the current position to the beginning or end of the line by pressing apple-left arrow or apple-right arrow.

 

[jsw]

I completely agree - the 'home' and 'end' keys should work as advertised. Yeah, I know the shortcuts, but I think it's dumb that I need to use 3rd party apps to use 'home' and 'end' (i.e., they work in Word, for example).

And I also agree that the shift-arrow selection is silly - and bbarnhart, it still works the same dumb way in most OS X apps - select some mail in Mail, then use the shift-arrow technique to select more. Note that it doesn't work the way it "should".

My final "why don't they just make it work the way you'd expect" pet peeve involves window resizing - come on, why can we only do it from the bottom right corner or the green button - which, call me crazy, never seems to work the way I want it to.

 

[fwhh]

Yes. The green button is really strange. And it is completly useless with a pdf-document in preview. Maybe Steve Jobs can arrange a blue (pill?) button next to the green one, causing the window to fill the screen?
But I think this feature will come when the 3-button-wheel-apple-bt-mouse comes out....

 

[whocares]

Maybe Steve Jobs can arrange a blue (pill?) button next to the green one, causing the window to fill the screen?

That is one thing I never want to see on a Mac, full screen windows. Not having them bugged me for a few weeks after switching, now I just can't stand them! Call me nuts, if you like 😛


To come back to the topic, I like the way the home key acts: it moves you to the top of the document/page. Especially useful in Safari to get back back to navigation bars at the top of website (like MR).

 

[6163621]

Blue screen good for visually handicapped

Certainly an option would be good (even if user selected) to give a better range to accessibility options.

Mind you, turning down the contrast/adjusting contrast on the Cinema Display might help (my problem) anyway as well.

 

[NickFalk]

Full size Schmull size

The reason Apple won't give you full size windows is because the interface is predominantely a drag and drop interface while Windows is more geared towards copy and paste. Dragging and dropping is not very easy if one window takes up the whole display. (Although Exposé should make this less of a problem).

 

[elmimmo]

At least those keys do work in a way, even if not the way you expect them to. Anybody wonders WTF is the "Help" key next to them for, when pretty much any Mac OS X app uses command+? for that? The even more annoying thing is that it actually does something in most apps, which is simply turning the cursor into a question mark which does nothing.

 

[Sabbath]

The reason Apple won't give you full size windows is because the interface is predominantely a drag and drop interface while Windows is more geared towards copy and paste. Dragging and dropping is not very easy if one window takes up the whole display. (Although Exposé should make this less of a problem).

Yup, definitely no "maximise" full screen windows please, although an option+greenpill click to set the window to a user defined default size would be nice. I personally don't have any problem with the home and end keys, its just something you need to adapt to. The most annoying thing is in office where they are not consistent with the rest of the OS. Additionally the way they are labelled on the apple keyboards with a diagonal arrow is perhaps more instructive as to the start and end of document use, than the home and end found on the 'books.

 

[ped]

That is one thing I never want to see on a Mac, full screen windows. Not having them bugged me for a few weeks after switching, now I just can't stand them! Call me nuts, if you like 😛


To come back to the topic, I like the way the home key acts: it moves you to the top of the document/page. Especially useful in Safari to get back back to navigation bars at the top of website (like MR).

CTRL-Home already does that on a PC. And CTRL-End takes you to the bottom.

 

[bousozoku]

There is only one thing that I consider a problem with the home and end keys: the text cursor does not move. I press the home key and I start to type and the window goes back to the previous insertion point and I have text where I don't want it.

As far as the rest of the keyboard shortcuts go, they were designed before Apple had home and end keys on every keyboard, so the shortcuts should stay that way. It's not as if older keyboards will suddenly change to accomodate changes in the operating system.

Besides all that, it was a good six years after the Macintosh that the x86 world even attempted a unified group of keyboard shortcuts and they were not easy to follow. e.g. was control-delete cut or copy? maybe, it was shift-delete. I think that Shift-insert was paste. Those are certainly easy to remember. 😀 I enjoyed trying to run around the office trying to find a word processor I knew how to work. Printing a document? F7, F3, control-P, right Shift-stand on one foot and hum the national anthem? Finally, I asked someone if I could use their Macintosh since there was no guessing. 🙂

I know it's tough for people who have been using Windows for a while but Apple did things with good reason. Switching can be tricky and the documentation isn't always great, but the design of things makes sense once you unlearn things. 🙂

 

[wrldwzrd89]

At least those keys do work in a way, even if not the way you expect them to. Anybody wonders WTF is the "Help" key next to them for, when pretty much any Mac OS X app uses command+? for that? The even more annoying thing is that it actually does something in most apps, which is simply turning the cursor into a question mark which does nothing.

The only reason the Help key is still around is because some users are still using Mac OS 9, where it serves a valid purpose. On Mac OS X, it's useless. When the Classic environment goes away, the Help key will go away too - Apple will think of a new shortcut to assign to the key, though, and will simply rename it instead of removing it from their keyboards.

 

[spaceballl]

I know it's tough for people who have been using Windows for a while but Apple did things with good reason. Switching can be tricky and the documentation isn't always great, but the design of things makes sense once you unlearn things. 🙂

Yes, I switched to the mac platform years ago because everything was far more intuitive. However, pressing the home and end buttons and not having the cursor move is not very intuitive. Why would i want to "unlearn" common logic? I wish I were better at programming. I'm sure it isn't hard to make the Apple home/end keys act like normal home/end keys.

-Kevin

 

[Warped1]

Home and End drove me nuts at first also until I started using the up and down arrows instead to move the cursor to the beginning and end.

I'm a new Mac user and still would like to have a key remapping program to keep it like the pc. It's hard to break 20 year habits.

 

[bousozoku]

Yes, I switched to the mac platform years ago because everything was far more intuitive. However, pressing the home and end buttons and not having the cursor move is not very intuitive. Why would i want to "unlearn" common logic? I wish I were better at programming. I'm sure it isn't hard to make the Apple home/end keys act like normal home/end keys.

-Kevin

Normal? You switched years ago? Common logic?

Command-left, Command-right really isn't that difficult to understand or learn when you're trying to move to the beginning and ending of a line. Get used to it, it's been that way for 20 years and it's not changing. 😉