MacMost: Text Editing

It is easier than ever before to add special characters like emoji or symbols to anything you type on your Mac. But just using a simple keyboard shortcut, you can browse and search through different types of characters and add them to your text. Recently, Apple added the ability to set the skin color for many emojis.

MacBook keyboards and wireless keyboards no longer have Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys. However, this functionary is still there if you know the correct keys to use to trigger these actions. In addition, you can also forward delete and find the location of the cursor with keyboard shortcuts.

If you need to create printable forms that have blank spaces, you should use tab stops instead of underscore characters. Using tab stops allows you to line up blank spaces perfectly, making your forms look more professional.

Learn how to select text by character, word, line or paragraph. You can use the Option or Command keys as modifiers in conjunction with the arrow keys. You can also use the mouse to select by character, word, or paragraph with the right number of clicks.

You can use the application Text Expander and other programs like it. You assign shortcuts to longer pieces of text, so that when you type a few characters, those characters are replaced with the longer piece of text. It works in any Mac program. ;

Before you buy a professional word processor consider using TextEdit, a program that comes with your Mac and can handle most non-professional word processing needs. You can format and style text, add images, lists and tables, and even open Word docs.

Text Clippings allow you to save pieces of text as small files in the Finder and drag them into text documents and fields. You can create them by dragging text from an application to the Finder.

Learn about the new text substitution feature in Snow Leopard that lets you create your own text shortcuts so you can quickly type commonly used phrases or hard-to-type characters.

There are four text editors you can use from the Terminal: Pico, Nano, Vi and Emacs. Each can be used to quickly edit text files. Learn how to access them and what makes them different.

TextEdit is one of the most underrated pieces of software that comes with your Mac. Learn how to use it to create rich text tables and lists.

How to use the built-in Mac OS X spell check in many applications like TextEdit, Mail and Safari. You can make it learn new words and reset your custom dictionary.