One of the things that has long bugged me about Mac OS X (one of the few things!) is the different way that the Home and End keys function inside a document. I have long been used to Home moving to the beginning of the current line, and End moving to the end of the current line (both on Windows and Linux machines), but on OS X they seem to move to the end of the document and the beginning of the document. After months of working on OS X I have yet to get used to this functionality so today I set out to find a solution. This is what I found.
I quickly found that there are a lot of people with this same gripe. Google is ripe with suggestions. Some of them manual keyboard re-mapping tricks, others suggesting the “Mac way” to achieve the same, and some with third-party software solutions. I went with the latter in this case.
There is a free program available called DoubleCommand, which allows you to remap the way your keyboard works with a number of pre-defined checkboxes. All you need to do in order to gain the “normal” Home and End functionality is to click a box and Activate the changes. Here are five steps you can follow to achieve Home and End normalfication.
- Download DoubleCommand
- Install by double-clicking on the .pkg file and following the prompts.
- Launch DoubleCommand via: Apple > System Preferences > DoubleCommand
- Select “PC style Home and End keys”
- Save (System wide or User) and Activate
Next time you’re in a document and need to hit the beginning or end of a line, simply press fn-home/end and you’ve got the functionality the way you might expect it to work. Enjoy!
If you have any other solutions to this problem please share them in the comments. As they say, there is more than one way to skin a cat!