Two Quick Tips for Working with Text Faster

Here are two handy tips for working in text editors, guaranteed to increase your productivity.

Lewis writes:

Holding alt whilst dragging in the mouse in a cocoa text editor will change the cursor to a crosshair and allow you to ‘block’ select text in a square. This is particularly useful when working with tabular data.

As Lewis notes, this is a handy tip when working with tabular data and also when removing the first a column of characters in a text block.

This works in most text applications, including TextEdit and Word. Unfortunately there are some other text editors that don’t seem to support this, like ecto and ~~TextMate~~ (Update: It looks like in TextMate you press ALT once. Thanks everyone!).

This is what selecting columns of text looks like:

Picture 6.png

Another useful way to work with text is by increasing or decreasing the indentation.

In many OS X text fields you can change this by pressing either:

Command+] and Command+[ or
Tab and Shift+Tab.

The tab version is fairly obvious but the Command+] is more subtle.

What are your tips for working with text fields?

Either reply in the comments or submit a tip and get some traffic to your site.

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Written by Brad Jasper on June 5, 2008 at 10:40 pm - Two Quick Tips for Working with Text Faster has 15 comments - Categorized in Easy Tips, OS X Tips, Productivity Tips

15 Responses to “Two Quick Tips for Working with Text Faster”

Florian Leitner

Sorry, this is not true. Block selection always worked in TextMate, and exactly as described - with ALT. June 6th, 2008 at 3:43 am
Patrick

For me the block selection works fine in TextMate.

And of course there are the standard shortcuts with:
 + Arrow keys,
 + ⇧ + Arrow keys,
⌥ + Arrow keys

which significantly speeds up working with text. June 6th, 2008 at 5:20 am
Richard

I tried the "alt+dragging" tip in Pages and Word 2008 on my MacBook Pro to no effect. It did work in Word 2004 and Scrivener. June 6th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Erik Reagan

Textmate has a version of this feature. It's slightly different because Textmate is a programming editor so the "block select" doesn't work on single line elements. They call it 'column selecting'. If you have any form of wrapping turned on in Textmate it can be easy to think you can column select a portion of the text however because it's just 1 line being wrapped there is only one column in the first place.

If you have line breaks within your document that is open in Textmate you can hold Option to column select. There are a few more tricks with this feature that can be found by experimenting with the keyboard. :) June 6th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Jacob Johnson

Actually, Textmate™ *does* support column selections.

Otherwise this is a fantastic tip! I wish I'd known about this kind of stuff 2 years ago when I began working on OS X.

It should be a requirement to teach this in school! June 6th, 2008 at 7:02 am
Joseph McLaughlin

Column selection works fine in TextMate, all you do is press alt/option once to toggle column selection. (You don't have to press and hold)

Hope this makes sense,

Joseph McLaughlin
http://blog.josephmclaughlin.info June 6th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Dan Ashley

Newcomers are flocking to the Mac by the millions.

A phrase like "cocoa text editor" doesn't communicate to us.

How would this tip translate into plain English?

Thanks!

- Dan Ashley, Chicago June 6th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Omer Zach

Wow, that is reallly cool! June 6th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Steven

This is awesome! The first tip works in Terminal, Smultron, and Preview - copying text from the multi-column pdfs I get all the time is no longer a pain! June 6th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Brad Jasper

Good to know about TextMate, thanks for the corrections everyone. June 6th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Partners in Grime

Cocoa is basically Apple's Objective-C based programming environment for Mac OS X.
http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/ June 6th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Christina

Partners wrote:
""Cocoa is basically Apple's Objective-C based programming environment for Mac OS X.
http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/""

Thanks for the start. . .but what does that mean. . .does that refer to software developed by apple for apple? or is it primarily for outside developers writing for apple users? In otherwords, would the tip work in all of my iXX programs or mostly in my 3rd party apps?

So glad to have these tips by the way - thanks! Anyone know how to drag & drop highlighted text on a mac? June 8th, 2008 at 6:15 am
Joseph McLaughlin

Christina wrote:
"Thanks for the start. . .but what does that mean. . .does that refer to software developed by apple for apple? or is it primarily for outside developers writing for apple users?"

Anyone can write applications in Cocoa, it's an open framework for macs.

Christina wrote:
"In otherwords, would the tip work in all of my iXX programs or mostly in my 3rd party apps?"

In my experience it depends on how new the app is. Apple completely rewrote several core pieces of the OS in Cocoa when they made Leopard. A way you can tell if an app is written in Cocoa or not is if you can scroll when that app isn't selected. i.e. Open Safari and open a finder window on top of that, move your mouse cursor over the open Safari window and attempt to scroll, it's a pretty cool feature.

Feel free to email me with questions,

Joseph McLaughlin
joseph@josephmclaughlin.info June 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Erik Reagan

Just to update all

I'm a big fan of TextMate so I created a new site just for the app called TextMate Tips. Take a look over a textmatetips.com. You might learn something

Tip contributions are welcome! June 22nd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
khsing

But the Alt key does not work with Mail.app July 3rd, 2008 at 8:41 pm