Another cool thing your Mac can do

Sep 2006

If you are typing something in any cocoa application and you are not sure how to spell the word, Mac OS X has a nice feature giving you some suggestions.

For example you are trying to write that ridicul.. redicuou… ridicuol … errr … ridiculously complicated word, and for a million dollars you wouldn’t be able to get it right just now. All you need to do is to type part of the word and hit escape on your keyboard (or F5, thanks Jeff). The list of suggestions drops down and you just pick the right one, that simple.

I have tried it in Mail.app, iChat, TextEdit, RapidWeaver, iWeb, Mac Journal and few other applications, and it works fine.

New to Mac, Tips

Comments

jeff

September 26th, 2006 at 8:33 PM

On my PowerBook, I have to hit F5 to see the drop-down choices. I don’t think I changed the default configuration on my machine. (Hitting escape takes me out of the drop-down if I don’t want to select something on the list.)
Janice

September 26th, 2006 at 10:07 PM

i tried on safari’s and found that you will erase with ESC, but otherwise the ESC works fine in other programs like mail.app.
Markus

September 27th, 2006 at 7:25 AM

Hmm, doesn’t work on my PB with either key…
R031E5

September 29th, 2006 at 12:35 PM

Yeap, it should work in any Cocoa made application, hitting the ESC key works for me, but F5 is reserved for the sound :p
Cliff

October 9th, 2006 at 1:37 PM

Those with notebook keyboards have to press [FN] [F5] unless they configured otherwise. [Esc] won’t work on those form items such as search boxes. Pressing [esc] there will delete the line. Press [F5] or [FN F5] to work around it. Love this.
paul

December 18th, 2006 at 12:03 AM

option-escape does it for me as well as F5 in 10.3.9; cool.