Natural Selection

Dragging the Cursor

Perhaps the most common approach to text selection is to click a point on the screen using a mouse or trackpad and drag the cursor some distance across the screen, selecting any text in between. You can also double-click to select whole words or a triple-click to select whole paragraphs, and you can drag before releasing the last click to select multiples.

Additionally, in some applications you can hold the Option key to select a rectangular area of text rather than to the extents of lines of text found along the way. This can be useful when trying to capture a block of text visually represented as a column. And, sometimes you can hold the Command key to select multiple discrete blocks of text, just like selecting multiple noncontiguous items in a list.

However, I find the need for precise motor skills to be the downfall of these input devices, especially when selecting editable text. For folks with motor challenges, such as those caused by arthritis and tunnel syndromes, click-and-drag requires particular force and control that could be avoided by getting to know a few keyboard shortcuts.

The Venerable Shift Key

Since the Remington No. 2 Type-Writer of 1878, the Shift key has been a tool for raising the case of letters on a typewriter or keyboard, or modifying a key with two characters to type the one above.

Hence, it is commonly represented by an up arrow (⇧) and, in modern computing standards, is considered the Level 2 Select key.

Did you know you can also use Shift in combination with arrow keys (and other modifiers) to select text?

Text Selection at Your Fingertips

First it’s important to learn some conventions of navigating text with a physical keyboard. These keys are not present on the iPhone/iPad on-screen keyboard, but all of these shortcuts work on those devices when used with a physical keyboard containing the keys.

In editable text in most applications:

• Arrow keys pressed alone move the cursor one character or line at a time in the chosen direction
• Option+Arrow moves the cursor horizontally one word or vertically one paragraph at a time
• Command+Arrow moves the cursor horizontally to the beginning or end of the line or vertically to the beginning or end of the document or text box

Add the Shift key to select any text between the current and next cursor locations. You can also click a position in read-only text and Shift+click elsewhere to select the text in between, even though no cursor is visible.

Additionally, extended keyboards have Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys. These can be mimicked by holding the fn key and pressing Left, Right, Up, or Down, respectively.

These keys are primarily used for scrolling to the top, to the bottom, one screen up, or one screen down, without moving the cursor. However, you can also modify them with Shift to select text with the same boundaries.

Bonus: Delete Directly

To save a step when deleting more than one character at a time, you can sometimes avoid selecting it first. The regular Delete key (above the Return key on a Mac keyboard; Backspace — above Enter — on a PC keyboard) deletes text before the cursor.

Extended keyboards may have a Forward Delete key (⌦), which deletes text after the cursor; fn+Delete mimics this key.

With this in mind, you can modify these keys with Option to delete to the beginning or end of the current word or with Command to delete to the beginning or end of the current line.