OS X El Capitan – How to Change Text Direction

I've noticed that certain applications seem to trap the gestures, even when they're no longer active.

The only time I've been able to 100% narrow down something trapping various shortcut keys was with either Apple Remote Desktop (the built in screen sharing functions), or Microsoft Remote Desktop.

Even though I clicked outside of the app and started using something else, something caused notably my ctrl+←/→ to stop working.

I unfortunately do not remember the specific steps I took to resolve the issue. Whether it was explicitly sending focus into the remote connection window, and then (with the mouse only) explicitly out of the window, and onto another app that is not just the Desktop, might have fixed the problem. Otherwise, I may have just closed the window in frustration.

Either way, this issue is one that you may have to do some personal diagnosing to figure out. Check for any running apps that are notably not native (Java, AIR-based, etc.), or have some other form of deep integration (trapping keyboard events and sending them to another computer is pretty deep), that may be causing this issue.

According to this blog post, you can create a file called ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.Dict (you might have to create the KeyBindings folder in your Library folder).

In that file, you need the following content:

{
   "@\UF702"  = "moveWordBackward:";
   "@\UF703"  = "moveWordForward:";    
}

(see the linked blog post for other Windows features you might want to recreate)

Not all programs that use text fields will use the default keybindings, but this will help with many programs.