5 Advanced Text Editing Keyboard Shortcuts

If you spend most of your day inside a text editor/word processor, or if you’re just a power user, you will know a lot of the basic keyboard shortcuts. They speed up those recuring tasks like saving, copy/cut/paste, opening/closing files etc. But did you know there are some incredibly powerful shortcut keys just for text editing?

Here’s a list of 5 advanced text editing keyboard shortcuts that will speed up your work flow and make you wonder how you lived without them.

1. Jump to next/previous word

   Windows: Ctrl + left/right arrow.
   Mac: Option key + left/right arrow.

2. Jump to top/bottom of document

   Windows: Ctrl + home/end.
   Mac: Command + up/down arrow.

3. Go to end/start of current line

   Windows: home/end.
   Mac: Command + left/right arrow.

4. Select characters one at a time

   Windows: Shift + left/right arrow.
   Mac: Shift + left/right arrow.

5. Select next/previous word

   Windows: Shift + Ctrl + left/right arrow.
   Mac: Shift + Option + left/right arrow.

6. Bonus: Jump to end of next line

   Mac: Option + up/down

I hope you enjoy your new found advanced text editing skills and feel free to leave any more you may have in the comments.

About The Author

Jacob Wyke is a web developer from the UK who makes complex things simple on the internet. He develops a batch image resizer for Mac OS X called ImageXY which you should try if you ever need to resize anything for the web.

You should also follow him on twitter.