René Rebe

Just yesterday I accidently “discovered” that some Mac OS X applications allow to select text in a rectangular area, as opposed within the regular text flow, with whole lines between the start and end. Simply holding down the Option-key (fork with alt) before selecting trigges it. This appears to work in at least Xcode, Terminal, Console, Textedit and Preview (but not e.g. Safari, nor Mail). Actually it works in most selectable NSTextField instances.

Update: Looks like a new feature of Leopard, 10.5. Poking around some more it’s even possible to extend text selection while holding down the Apple-key, which then adds the inverse selection of the area. That is: unselected parts are selected, and those already selected previous and inside the new area become unselected.

Interesting that they implemented such an “complex” selection theme (that is quite some lines of code to get right).

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 9:23 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.