How to make a simple 'make highlighted text' lowercase macro?

The base meta-key on OSX is ^ (Control) rather than (Option).

Some commands are ⌃ and some are ⌥. For example ⌃f is forward-char and ⌥.f is forward-word.

Sorry, I should have given ⌃key examples.

Where do you get your modifier images? I think in some places I would prefer using those to the standard glyphs. Maybe we could have a palette of those similar to the Menu Glyphs.group from the Library.

Hey Mitchell,

That's just markdown:

<kbd>⌘</kbd><kbd>⌥</kbd><kbd>F</kbd>

Gives:

F

-Chris

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Well that’s cool! Didn’t know about that one.

I am going to provide a guide to the most commonly used built-in Cocoa text keybindings, but for now I want to point out a particular use of the built-in keybindings

The keystrokes that delete text — ⌃K, ⌥D, and ⌥⌫ in particular — accumulate that text on a clipboard separate from the OS X clipboard and, ⌃Y inserts that clipboard’s text.

There are four big advantages for using these keys (and for the first advantage, the same holds true for others of the keystrokes buiilt-in to Cocoa text editors):

  1. Cocoa text key bindings are much quicker to use than the mouse, or even arrow key combinations.

  2. Many of the Cocoa keybindings don’t have regular OS X equivalents.

  3. The secondary clipboard accumulates text deletions; pasting that text back can then be done with a single keystroke, rather than a series of keystrokes or mouse clicks with the KM Maestro clipboard history.

  4. It is very convenient to have a second clipboard that is used with these short-term commands — it doesn’t disturb the current clipboard (although that is far more important without KM’s clipboard history).

d is not a normal Cocoa keybinding.

It normally produces the character: ∂

D produces the character: Î

-Chris

Testing in TextEdit and TextWrangler, none of those keystrokes worked as you indicated, except for ⌥⌫

In particular, ⌃Y just pastes the current clipboard, not the "deleted text" clipboard you refer to.

Personally, I wouldn’t expect a programming editor to conform to those things - they need as many hotkeys as possible. Just my opinion, though.

TextEdit works with ^K and ^Y. So does Mail.

FWIW. YMMV.

Strange, just tested TextEdit again, and these don't work for me.
It is possible that I have those keys set as hotkeys somewhere, but I don't recognize them for TextEdit.

EDIT: Yep, I have hot keys for both of those. My apologies for the confusion.

User error. g,d&r

:stuck_out_tongue:

K works fine in both TextEdit and TextWrangler.

However TextWrangler (and BBEdit) do not support the secondary pasteboard.

Y Yank (paste from secondary pasteboard)

A Go to beginning of paragraph.
E Go to end of paragraph.
K Kill (delete) to end of paragraph and add to Yank buffer.
F Forward one character.
B Backward one character.
F Forward one word.
B Backward one word.

There are a bunch of them that work in Cocoa applications and in OSX text fields.

-Chris

You can't run fast enough to avoid the Texas lasso. LOL

LOL. That reminds me of my friend who was a CHP officer. He would say “You can’t outrun the Motorola Overdrive” (radio).

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Chris,

Don’t all of these, except K, have standard Mac OSX shortcuts:

A Go to beginning of paragraph.
E Go to end of paragraph.
F Forward one character.
B Backward one character.
F Forward one word.
B Backward one word.

And with all of the movements, just add to select the text.

I make heavy use of the key in my KM macro triggers, so using it for movements is pretty much out for me.

Try ⌥D in TextEdit and see what you get. If you are getting a MacRoman character it means I did something a great many years ago to activate the traditional Emacs/terminal/Cocoa text editor ⌃ and ⌥ bindings and there is no way I would remember how. Would have to search the web. I know I made a few changes to my DefaultKeyBinding.dict but I don’t think anything so radical as to enable those keystrokes.

These bindings are built in to the Cocoa Text Editor component.

Hey Mitchell,

I have. :smile:

You've made changes to your system.

-Chris

It may come down to whether ⌥ is enabled as meta, since yes, in a default user, most of the ⌥ keybindings I claimed work don’t. I don’t know of a way to enable meta as a single action, though.

The default Cocoa bindings are in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict, but I can’t figure out to read or convert that. It used to be readable by Xcode I think. Text System Defaults and Key Bindings

User keybindings, if any, go in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict/. It is not necessary to repeat the bindings assigned by the system — you can just add your own to add to or override the system bindings.

See Text System Defaults and Key Bindings and many examples of full /DefaultKeyBindings.dict files on the web.

The following should work out of the box — again, this is only in Cocoa Text Editor components — applications like BBEdit do whatever they feel like. Browser Text Boxes are not Cocoa Text Boxes, although control-commands generally work in them. (I think text boxes in some web pages support the option commands too, but I’m not sure.)

  • ⌃A beginning of line/paragraph (depending)
  • ⌃B back one character
  • ⌃D delete one character forward
  • ⌃E end of line/paragraph (depending)
  • ⌃F forward one character
  • ⌃H delete one character backward
  • ⌃K kill to end of line/paragraph (depending)
  • ⌃N next line
  • ⌃O open line (i.e., insert RETURN at cursor and stay before RETURN)
  • ⌃P previous line
  • ⌃Q “quote” — i.e., take literally — the next character, rather than treating it as keybinding
  • ⌃T transpose characters around cursor
  • ⌃V down one page (with a little bit skewed idea of “page”)
  • ⌃W “delete to mark” — complicated to explain
  • ⌃Y paste the most recent sequence of keystrokes that delete

No, not all the ⌃ bindings have OS X equivalents, and for the ones that do, some people find it more convenient to use letter-key commands rather than special-key commands, since they involve less finger/hand movement. Depends a lot on how much you’ve used these bindings in the past — terminal, Emacs, whatever.

Cocoa Text System is a 10-year old but still useful reference that includes basic information on changing Cocoa keybindings.

See osx - Emacs-like Meta (Option/Alt) key functionality in OS X Lion? - Super User to see how to enable the very most basic ⌥ commands.

Something is strange. This reply contains <kbd>⌃</kbd>. Here it looks like yours — — but the same ```kbd`` construction at the end of the first paragraph of this post yields different shading.