Pages 1.0.x: No keyboard shortcut to move insertion point to beginning/end of document?
Posted by Pierre Igot in: PagesSeptember 1st, 2005 • 12:06 pm
As far as I can tell, there is no direct keyboard shortcut in Apple’s Pages application to move the insertion point to the beginning or end of the document you are currently editing.
If you press the Home key, Pages scrolls up to the beginning of the document, but does not move the insertion point, which stays where it is. So if you start typing text after pressing the Home key, Pages automatically scrolls back to where the insertion point is in the document.
The problem is the same with the End key.
If you try various combinations of modifier keys (Shift, Option, Command, Control) with the Home or End keys, all you get is a system beep, which is very useful indeed.
The only combination that does something useful is shift-Home/shift-End. This does not move the insertion point, but creates a selection from the insertion point to the beginning/end of the document.
If you then press the Left/Right cursor key after creating this selection, you can actually move the insertion point to the beginning/end of the document. But obviously this is rather clumsy and requires two steps, so it doesn’t really qualify as a keyboard shortcut.
In many other third-party applications, including BBEdit and Microsoft Word, you can use command-Home and command-End to actually move the insertion point to the beginning/end of the document. Why Apple didn’t include these shortcuts in Pages, I do not know.
And of course, since there is no menu commands in Pages to move the insertion point to the beginning or the end of a document, you cannot add these missing shortcuts to Pages yourself either.
In other words, you are stuck with the clumsy workaround: shift-Home followed by Left to move the insertion point to the beginning of the document, and shift-End followed by Right to move the insertion point to the end of the document.
It’s better than nothing, but it’s annoying nonetheless.
September 1st, 2005 at Sep 01, 05 | 12:31 pm
On my ibook it’s just Command-Up resp. Command-Down. Should be the same on an external keyboard. – It’s the same in TextEdit or in Mail, so I assume that it’s the general shortcut in any Cocoa app?!
September 1st, 2005 at Sep 01, 05 | 1:35 pm
Argh. Indeed, it works. I guess it’s the bad influence of Microsoft Word, where, for the longest time, command-Up and command-Down were shortcuts for moving up/down by one paragraph.
Indeed in Pages, Mail, and TextEdit, and even in Safari, command-Up and command-Down move the insertion point to the beginning or end of the area you are currently editing (text document, body of e-mail message, text field).
Thanks a lot for pointing this out. I guess a case could still be made that Apple should have provided some redundancy here and made command-Home and command-End work the same way as well, at least in Pages, where they are not used for anything else.
After all, as I explain above, the Home and End keys are indeed used in shortcuts for commands that involve going to the beginning or the end of the document. It would be logical.
Filing an “enhancement request” right now :). Thanks again.
September 1st, 2005 at Sep 01, 05 | 1:38 pm
I should add that the only application that does things right is BBEdit. In BBEdit, both sets of shortcuts work.