Tiger Bits: Autocomplete in Cocoa Applications

This strikes me as something that would be most useful in a device which is operated without a physical keyboard... like perhaps a tablet?

Hmm, my Option-Shift-K Apple symbol shows up as a question mark. I thought I was asking too much. Well, I meant command-F1. Not that it is important... oh me...

Great comment iFelix. Callum, under the 'Keyboard & Mouse' system preference click on the last tab: 'Keyboard Shortcuts.' Scroll down and change; I set mine to F1, resetting "Full Keyboard Access", which I never use, to ?(Command)-F1. It's beautiful. Customize away.

This is nice. And immediate - unlike that dictionary, that has a long way to go. Can anyone tell me how to re-route the dictionary from that three key combo (CTRL+?+D) to just the ESC key?

I lick this feather, it makes typhoid on my Powerhouse much easing.

As has been pointed out, this is not actually new. In Panther you could press F5 or option-esc to get the auto-completion. (The plain escape shortcut is new, and was probably added to make it easier to discover.) This works in any NSTextView (unless the application has specifically disabled it). Applications can modify what list of words is returned (Xcode does so, for example) .. see the description of -[NSTextView complete:] (and related methods and delegate methods) in the documentation.

I was aware of the autocomplete menu accessed by pressing escape in XCode, but I am pleased to see this is a system-wide feature!

This isn't new in Tiger; it was in Panther as well. And I use it fairly often when I'm not sure of a spelling, so I guess it's useful in the real world, at least to me. I always thought it was Option-Escape though, so I guess I did learn something new.