til/mac/keyboard-shortcuts-for-interacting-with-text-areas.md

# Keyboard Shortcuts For Interacting With Text Areas

When interacting with a document text area on MacOS (such as in the Notes app),
there are a bunch of keyboard shortcuts made available to you via the operating
system.

A couple common ones that I'm used to from Unix environments are:

- `ctrl-a` to move the cursor to the beginning of the line
- `ctrl-e` to move the cursor to the end of the line
- `ctrl-p` to move the cursor up a line (this is a common _previous_ keybinding)
- `ctrl-n` to move the cursor down a line (this is a common _next_ keybinding)

A handy one that I wasn't aware of is `ctrl-l` which will scroll the text area
so that the cursor gets centered in the view area.

A much more niche one I wasn't aware of is `ctrl-t` which swaps the character
before the cursor with the character after the cursor. I can only imagine this
being useful for quickly fixing transposed characters in a misspelled word,
e.g. `baer`.

There are many more *Document Shortcuts* as well as well as keyboard shorcuts
for other apps and situations. The full listing is at [Mac Keyboard
Shortcuts](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650).