Today’s post will be short – I promise!
Well. If anything has annoyed me about my new MacBook is the lack of page up and page down keys. There are substitutes for a few applications, but I find myself wondering how to navigate by pages in most of my work so far.
Fn – up/down arrow keys
This one appears to me to be the most common one. However it has some pitfalls…
Take Thunderbird mail for instance. This keyboard shortcut does nothing (really, I want the selected message to be the one a page higher, so I can navigate my sometimes overly full inbox, with ease). As another instance, take editing an email in Thunderbird mail. This shortcut scrolls the view up by a page, but thats not what I want – I want to move my cursor up by a page. Highly annoying.
So I thought it may just be that Thunderbird did not correctly map these key strokes, but after opening the standard TextEdit application that comes with the OS, the same happens, the view is scrolled, but the cursor stays where it is. If anyone knows a way to move the cursor up the page with the keyboard (without hitting the up arrow 40 times), I’de greatly appreciate it.
But wait, Google Docs to the rescue, or is it?
So then of course I tried a few other applications, the first one being Google Docs Spreadsheet. I tried page up and down, and by golly it worked. This is fantastic. I hit fn-up and the selected cell at the bottom of the page becomes unselected, and the unselected cell at the top of the page gains focus. Awesome!
But of course trying it in wordprocessor just happens the same way.
Conclusion…
Page up on the mac does not work like page up on linux/windows. This is actually confirmed by this post… Move the cursor during Page Up, Page Down scrolling … in case anyone is interested. Apparently you *can* get it to work in some applications, but not all.
PS: Vim seems to have its own mapping
There are probably not a lot of Mac users out there using VIM, but as I am from a Linux background, and a programmer, I simply love the power and simplicity with VIM. (For those who do not know, VIM is a console based text editor, everything can be done on the keyboard to navigate and edit the document). But of course I do a lot of navigating large source files using pageup and pagedown keys. I found this trick that helps me do that…
ctrl-f and ctrl-b
I can only guess, but I think my guess is very good… If you want to page down (or move forward in the document) try ctrl-f, and of course ctrl-b for moving backward in the document. Its not exactly intuitive, and a little awkward for the muscle memory to adjust to, but seems as though when I’m paging up I usually hit it about 10 times (until I find the place I want to stop, or I could simply be reading the document quickly) its not too much of an issue.
Tags: mac