Top 25 Text keyboard shortcuts on Mac everyone should know

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When working with text, you don’t want to switch between keyboard and trackpad(or mouse) frequently just to perform a simple text formatting, editing or text selection. If we can perform all the tasks though keyboard then thats make our work easy and faster, thats where keyboard shortcuts comes into picture. In this guide, I am going to share most commonly used text keyboard shortcuts on Mac.

Note: I am not going to list all the text shortcuts here, it will make this post boring, instead I will share only the useful and frequently used shortcuts.

Text selection keyboard shortcuts

These shortcuts will help you select the desired portion of text using keyboard –

  1. Command + Shift + Left Arrow – Selects text from the current cursor position to the beginning of line.
  2. Command + Shift + Right Arrow – Select text from current cursor position to the end of line.
  3. Shift + Option + left Arrow -Select text from current cursor position to the beginning of current word.
  4. Shift + Option + Right Arrow -Select text from current cursor position to end of the current word.
  5. Command + Shift + Up Arrow -Select text from current cursor position to beginning of text.
  6. Command + Shift + Down Arrow -Select text from current cursor position to the end of text.
  7. Command + A – Select All text.

Text navigation keyboard shortcuts

These shortcuts will help you jump to the certain area of the text.

  1. Command + Left Arrow – Jump the cursor to beginning of current line.
  2. Command + Right Arrow – Jump to the end of current line.
  3. Option + Left Arrow – Jump to beginning of current word.
  4. Option + Right Arrow – Jump to end of current word.
  5. Command + Up Arrow – Jump to beginning of text.
  6. Command + Down Arrow – Jump to end of text.
  7. Option + Up Arrow – Jump to the beginning of current paragraph.
  8. Option + Down Arrow – Jump to the end of current paragraph.

Text deletion keyboard shortcuts

Relying only on delete key is not going to do solve your text editing problems easily. Pressing other keys along with delete key can do amazing things that will help you in long run. In this section we are going to see keyboard shortcuts related to delete.

  1. Delete – deletes previous character, this doesn’t need any introduction, everyone uses it :).
  2. fn + Delete – This is commonly referred as forward delete. It deletes the next character from current cursor position.
  3. Command + Delete – Deletes the entire line from the current cursor position. For example, if you place the cursor in the middle of a line, this operation will delete the first half of line (from start till the place of cursor).
  4. Option + Delete – Deletes the previous word.
  5. Option + fn + Delete – Deletes the next word.

Text editing Keyboard shortcuts

Basic operations like cut, copy, paste comes under this section. You may be familiar with most of the shortcuts.

  1. Command + C – copies selected text to the clipboard.
  2. Command + X – cut the selected text and copies it to the clipboard
  3. Command + V – paste the copied text
  4. Command + Z – undo the changes
  5. Command + Y – redo the changes