the "end" and "home" buttons

ok i think i am a bit lost in the thinking like a windows person i suppose but why does the end button not take you to the end of a line in the sentence, and the home do vice versa? and if they dont do that what are their purposes? do they take you to the top and bottom of the page.. b/c "page up" and "page down" do that as well... please help.

Is this on the iMac or the MBP? Makes a difference. You do have the full sized wired keyboard on the iMac right?

You do not need those keys to do that. Control + left/right arrow will move the cursor to the beginning/end of a sentence.

Also:

Control+Shift+left/right arrow = highlight entire line

Option+left/right arrow = move the cursor left or right to a word one by one

Option+Shift+ left/right arrow = highlight a word one by one.

Shift+ left/right arrow = highlights a character one by one.

Have always used these shortcuts, I never click where I want to put the cursor

macwannabe said:

ok i think i am a bit lost in the thinking like a windows person i suppose but why does the end button not take you to the end of a line in the sentence, and the home do vice versa? and if they dont do that what are their purposes? do they take you to the top and bottom of the page.. b/c "page up" and "page down" do that as well... please help.

Click to expand...

After I switched to a mac I hated not being able to use Home and End (I still do). I have yet to figure out what the home and end keys are there for.

I've learned to live with it 'cause I cant remember the hot-keys that Cuhnool described. Every once in a while I will try and use them and sometimes I get lucky... Sometimes I hear the "error bonk". Other times I hit the wrong key combo's and end up in lah-lah land.

Everything about my mac I absolutely love except for that one stupid little thing.

I am on my iMac with the full sized Aluminum keyboard and Home takes me to the beginning of this line I am typing and End to the end.

dtravis7 said:

I am on my iMac with the full sized Aluminum keyboard and Home takes me to the beginning of this line I am typing and End to the end.

Click to expand...

How do you make it do that? Please tell.

droflex said:

How do you make it do that? Please tell.

Click to expand...

Funny thing is with the large full size apple keyboards the Home and End have always worked that here. Just on the notebooks and small keyboards where the issue shows up.

I have done nothing special. No special settings. 10.5.8 Leopard on iMac G5 and that full size Apple keyboard with the numbered keypad.

dtravis7 said:

Funny thing is with the large full size apple keyboards the Home and End have always worked that here. Just on the notebooks and small keyboards where the issue shows up.

I have done nothing special. No special settings. 10.5.8 Leopard on iMac G5 and that full size Apple keyboard with the numbered keypad.

Click to expand...

But I have the full size on my imac. Those keys dont do anything. I even have gone in to the keyboard section in preferences and tried to remap them but it doesnt give me the option to do it...At least I didnt think it did. It's been a little while since I went there.

Did you remap them somehow?

Edit: Oh, I see, you said you didnt. I'm confused.

droflex said:

But I have the full size on my imac. Those keys dont do anything. I even have gone in to the keyboard section in preferences and tried to remap them but it doesnt give me the option to do it...At least I didnt think it did. It's been a little while since I went there.

Did you remap them somehow?

Edit: Oh, I see, you said you didnt. I'm confused.

Click to expand...

I tried them on this message and in Pages and End goes to the end of the line I am typing and Home brings it back to the beginning. Checking to see if there is some setting but found nothing so far. I know I changed nothing.

I bought my machine used. Maybe the guy I bought it from changed something.

I seem to recall other people talking about this before and I believe I've read about it too. Oh well, I'm up too late again so I will check it out tomorrow.

In the mean time, thanks for letting me know that there is still the possibility to have them work that way.

cya

Before I sack-out, I copied this off a web site. I might try this tomorrow. Dont know why your keyboard is already good-to-go.

Later

Edit: After further investigation, I found an easier way than this. See my post that follows this one.

O.K. So forget about that screen shot I posted above. The following method is way easier.

Visit the following page and download/run the "keyfixer" program.

KeyFixer – Fix Your OS X Home and End Keys - Starry Hope Productions

You have to restart any app's you have currently running in order for it to take effect.

Works like a charm. Except for Firefox.

For Firefox you need to go here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9796

To have it work in Terminal: Go to Terminal -> Preferences -> Settings -> Keyboard and edit “Home” to "send string to shell" control-A, and then edit “End” to "send string to shell" control-E. See screen-shot attachments below.

Hope that helps.

i just used the first half of the post with the keyfixer and downloaded the add-on for firefox it works fine now. i did not have to go to terminal or anything.



Thanks for all the help all

macwannabe said:

i just used the first half of the post with the keyfixer and downloaded the add-on for firefox it works fine now. i did not have to go to terminal or anything.



Thanks for all the help all

Click to expand...

Cool! Glad it worked. Sorry that was misleading. I guess I should have worded the "Terminal" part differently. What I meant to say was that if you want the Terminal application to have the same Home/End key "fix" it has to be done separately in the Terminal "preferences" area.

A related question.

In the office (on PCs) I use Lotus Notes. In that the Insert key toggles email messages between 'read' and 'unread'. When I use my iMac - together with an XP VM session in Parallels - to connect in to this system via a VPN, I have no Insert key on my Mac keyboard. I only have a double-size Delete key.

Is there an Insert key please?

Nighthawk4 said:

A related question.

In the office (on PCs) I use Lotus Notes. In that the Insert key toggles email messages between 'read' and 'unread'. When I use my iMac - together with an XP VM session in Parallels - to connect in to this system via a VPN, I have no Insert key on my Mac keyboard. I only have a double-size Delete key.

Is there an Insert key please?

Click to expand...

Oh man!

Mac keyboard (no insert key) + XP under parallels + Lotus Notes + Need insert key = Brain aneurysm.

Have you tried remapping the keyboard (F13 for example) under system preferences? I cant imagine it working when running virtual because OSX doesnt know what "insert" is.

If you were running in bootcamp you would probably be able to remap the keys easier than doing it virtual.

I might boot into XP tonight (bootcamp) and see if I can get a key to perform an "insert" operation with F13. I will let you know if it worked.

If you can remap a key (ie: F13) in XP's remap function while running in Parallels then you will be good to go.

I thought Macs just worked.

OnceYouGoMac said:

I thought Macs just worked.

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hehe. They do. Except when you try and do stuff that they weren't designed to do (work with Windows). Then you have to get creative.

O.K. Update for Nighthawk4.

I went to XP in bootcamp (I have a headache now) and couldnt remap the keys in Windows. It doesnt have the native ability to do it like OSX does.

You may need to download a program like KeyTweak KeyTweak Homepage in order to remap the keys.

If it works in Parallels I dont know but I'm pretty sure it would work in bootcamp.

I'm happy changing my home/end keys and that's as far as I'm going to go with tweaking my machine. Everything else else is good-to-go.

Now I'm going to go back to enjoying it and playing.

OnceYouGoMac said:

I thought Macs just worked.

Click to expand...

As long as you don't try and use Mac OSX like it's Windows, things work fine.