MacOS – Remap “Home” and “End” to beginning and end of line

keyboardmacos

Most of my computing time is spent in Linux (with occasional time in Windows). On these platforms the Home and End keys universally jump to the beginning or end of the current line.

I am gradually getting used to using the one Apple computer in my life, but it is still frustrating than these keys seem to be bound to the beginning and end of the document and there doesn't seem to be any key at all for the line based actions.

My question:

  1. Are there existing keybindings I'm missing for beginning and end of line? (I mostly use a Terminal, Chrome and LibreOffice)
  2. Is there a way to rebind the functions of these keys to the functions I am familiar with? I am willing to give up the document based versions which seem of little use to me.

Also two caveats:

  1. I am not the only user on the system. It would be nice if my user settings didn't break other peoples experience. If this isn't possible, I think I probably have the strongest preference!
  2. I do use multiple languages and switch between keyboard layouts, so any solutions would be expected to work even when toggling between multiple keyboard layouts.

Best Answer

The default shortcuts for moving to beginning or end of (wrapped) lines are ⌘← and ⌘→. ⌥↑ and ⌥↓ or ⌃A and ⌃E move to the beginning or end of unwrapped lines (or paragraphs). ⌥← and ⌥→ move backwards/forward by words, and all of these are compatible with holding Shift to select during the corresponding moves.

You could remap home and end by creating ~/Library/KeyBindings/ and saving a property list like this as DefaultKeyBinding.dict:

{
    "\UF729"  = moveToBeginningOfLine:; // home
    "\UF72B"  = moveToEndOfLine:; // end
    "$\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:; // shift-home
    "$\UF72B" = moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:; // shift-end
}

Most of the keybindings for editing text in OS X are defined in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict.

Applying changes requires reopening applications. DefaultKeyBinding.dict is ignored by some old versions of Xcode (works with latest version 6.3.1), Terminal, and many cross-platform applications.

See Cocoa Text System and my website for more information about the customizable keybindings.

Terminal's keybindings can be customized in Preferences > Settings > Keyboard. \033OH moves to the beginning of a line and \033OF to the end of a line.

In Eclipse, key bindings should be modified in Preferences > General > Keys. You need to modify default bindings for commands Line Start and Line End (replace ⌘← by ↖ and ⌘→ by ↘). For selection to work, also modify Select Line Start and Select Line End.

PS: You may need to logout and login again for the ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict change to take effect.

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