Better Edit Keys 1.1 review

Better Edit Keys is a cool system enhancement that allows you to use the shift, option and control keys with the arrows, delete, forward delete and clear keys in any standard text editing field, including basic text editors such as SimpleText.

License: Shareware OS: Mac OS X File size: 115K Developer: Alessandro Levi Montalcini Buy Now Price: $10.00 Updated: 19 Dec 2005

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Better Edit Keys is a cool system enhancement that allows you to use the shift, option and control keys with the arrows, delete, forward delete and clear keys in any standard text editing field, including basic text editors such as SimpleText. This makes it much easier to work with text without reaching the mouse.

With Better Edit Keys you can use handy text editing keys everywhere.

The following key combinations are allowed:
- shift + any arrow: extend the current selection.
- option + left/right arrow: move to the previous or next word.
- control + left/right arrow or option + up/down arrow: move to the beginning or end of the current line.
- shift + option + any arrow: move like option + arrow while extending the selection.
- option + delete: delete up to the beginning of the current word (or clear selection).
- forward delete or shift + delete: delete the next character (or clear selection).
- option + forward delete or shift + option + delete: delete up to the end of the current word (or clear selection).
- clear: clear the current selection, if any.
- option + clear: delete the current word (or clear selection).

The above tasks should usually be performed by applications, but many of them don’t care. Better Edit Keys implements this default behavior in all situations where the application is not already taking care of it, but it does nothing if the application handles the keystrokes by itself. This means that the above keystrokes will not work if the application already handles them.

For example recent versions of SimpleText handle the forward delete key by themselves, which also disables the option + forward delete keystroke provided by Better Edit Keys. There is no safe way to override the application’s own handling of the keystrokes, so Better Edit Keys is only useful for applications that don’t handle them and for generic text editing fields like the ones in dialog windows.