How To Move The Cursor Position in a Text Document?

Questions & Suggestions
1

I have read dozens of posts about moving the cursor. All of them use the word cursor instead of the correct word pointer. The arrow-shaped pointer indicates mouse position. The vertical line cursor (that usually blinks) indicates the active position between text characters. A cursor always exists at the same time as a pointer, but they are not usually in the same location.

So, given the correct definitions above, does anyone know how to change the cursor position in a text document, preferably without moving the pointer?

2

For relative repositioning you should be able to use left and right arrow keystrokes in most text editing applications:

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For absolute positioning (e.g. character position N in a document), you would need the particular scripting interface of a specific application.

3

At the risk of being obvious, there are also other keystrokes that will navigate within most text documents:
Up/Down-Arrow will move the cursor line by line.
Option-R/L Arrow will move the cursor word by word.
Command-R/L Arrow will move the cursor to the beginning or end of a line.
Command-Home/End will move the cursor to the beginning or end of a document.

1 Like
4

Hey @GregT,

Please be more specific about what you're trying to do.

Apple has provided very little direct control over the text cursor, but there are various work-arounds – some that are fairly universal – and some that are very app-specific like in BBEdit.

-Chris