Basic Text Editing

If you have edited text elsewhere on a Mac, Espresso should feel familiar. Basic text selection and moving around a document are identical to most other Mac text fields.

Topics

• Keyboard navigation
• Scrolling the document
• Selecting text
• Deleting text
• Switching from Windows

Keyboard navigation

The easiest way to move around your document using the keyboard is with the arrow keys. Pressing the left or right keys will move you one character in either direction, while pressing the up or down keys will move you one line in that direction (and try to maintain your column placement).

If you press option left or option right, you will jump between words. (Depending on your system settings, certain punctuation characters may be considered word characters; see the Quick Tip). If you press option up, you will jump to the beginning of the previous line (acts the same regardless of whether soft wrapping is on or off). Similarly, if you press option down, you will jump to the end of the next line.

Press command left or command right to jump to the beginning or end of the line your cursor is on. This will respect soft wrapping, so if you are in a very long line that has been soft wrapped several times and need to get to the beginning or end of the actual line, it may be quicker to press option up or option down to reach the next line, and then arrow from there to the beginning or end of the line you want.

If you press command up or command down you will jump to the very beginning or end of the document, respectively.

Scrolling the document

You can scroll your document using the page up, page down, home, and end keys. Pressing page up or page down will scroll you upwards or downwards, while home will scroll to the very beginning of the document and end will scroll to the very end of the document.

If you are using a laptop keyboard without these keys, you can simulate them using the following keypresses:

• function up for page up
• function down for page down
• function left for home
• function right for end

Selecting text

To select text instead of moving your cursor, just hold down the shift key and otherwise use the same shortcuts as you would to navigate the document. For instance, shift left or shift right will add a single character in either direction to your selection, shift option left and shift option right will add everything to the next word break to your selection, and shift command left or shift command right will add everything from your cursor to the beginning or end of the line to your selection.

Deleting text

As you would expect, the delete key will delete the current selection, or a single character to the left of your cursor. However, just like the arrow keys, you can modify the delete behavior. Pressing option delete will delete everything from your cursor to the first word break preceding the cursor. Pressing command delete will delete everything from your cursor to the beginning of the line (respects soft wrapping).

Pressing forward delete will behave similarly to delete but will delete the next character to the right of the cursor (it can also be modified by holding option to delete up to the next word break). If you are using a laptop keyboard without a dedicated forward delete key, you can obtain the same behavior using function delete.

Switching from Windows

On Windows keyboards, the "backspace" key is the same as the Mac "delete" key, and the "delete" key is the same as the Mac "forward delete" key.

Unlike on Windows, the home and end keys do not move the cursor. Instead, these keys will scroll the document. Typically, people who get frustrated with the lack of Windows-like home/end support are looking for command left and command right.