Fix Home and End Keys on Mac OS X

Nothing in this world makes less sense then how Apple decided to make Home, End, Page-Up, and Page-Down work.

I’m not sure where, when, and why this started. But on every other modern day operating system, these keys work like this:

- Home -> move the cursor to the beginning of the line
- End -> move the cursor to the end of the line
- Pg-Up -> move the cursor up the length of the viewport
- Pg-Dn -> move the cursor down the length of the viewport

Now I don’t know why I am even repeating these descriptions. As much as the sky is blue and earth is below our feet, everyone knows what these buttons do.

Unless you are on a Mac. Apple in its infinite wisdom decided this wasn’t a good idea. These buttons don’t make any sense if you have a one button mouse, so let’s make them useless!

- Home -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) to the beginning of the DOCUMENT
- End -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) to the end of the DOCUMENT
- Pg-Up -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) up the length of the viewport
- Pg-Dn -> move (nothing, not even the cursor, just your view) down the length of the viewport

Now, just the fact alone that you can’t, with a single key press, move the end of the sentence is beyond me. Who the hell would want to do that?! But ALSO, the cursor doesn’t move with the view port. So if you find something interesting as you are paging around, you can’t edit it without brining your one button mouse over. Some how, I am reminded of a conversation in “Dude, where’s my car?”

“DUDE! SWEEET!”

Now, maybe that wasn’t the exact conversation Steve Jobs had with himself when he thought of that “feature.” But at most it was replaced with “GNARLY!”

What’s so absurd about this is how no one ever complains about it. I mean, giving this behavior to these buttons essentially renders them USELESS! I can’t believe there are so many people out there that just look at these four buttons and say, “What the heck is that! I’m not using THEM!” Because if you did use them, you would realize how terrible the behavior is.

At any rate, at least Apple designs great software. You can change this absolutely idiotic behavior by editing some local preferences. Here is how:

1. Create a new text file at:

Users/[your username]/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

(If you have already messed with key bindings, this file might already be present.)

2. Copy and paste this code into the file:

{
    "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
    "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";
    "\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
    "\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";
}

3. Put your junk in that box (err, save DefaultKeyBinding.dict)

4. Open that box (err, close and reopen any applications to take affect)

That’s it!

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Disclaimer:

- I am a Mac, Windows, and Linux user
- On the whole, Apple is usually pretty good about this crap.