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Tiger Bits: Autocomplete in Cocoa Applications

Autocomplete Even though I am a hardened Apple pundit it seems that Tiger has a few tricks up its sleeve for me to discover, or at least for people to email to us in the form of tips which I then take credit for figuring out myself.

If you are in a Cocoa application and typing along, but you just don't feel like typing the rest of the word you are in the middle of just hit the 'Esc' key. A menu with a bunch of different possible completions for the word you started are offered up to you in a nice, scrollable interface. Simply click on the one you want to go with and let the OS do the typing.

Now, this is pretty cool though I question the real world usefulness of this application. However, anything that you can show to a PC user to impress them about Tiger is good enough for me.

Tip of the hat to michael for sending this  my way.
 

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OS Odds and ends

Even though I am a hardened Apple pundit it seems that Tiger has a few tricks up its sleeve for me to discover, or at least for people to...
 

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James

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

May 27 2005 at 12:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Van Daniel

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...

May 27 2005 at 12:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Van Daniel

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.

May 27 2005 at 12:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Callum Alden

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?

May 27 2005 at 7:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
iFelix

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

May 27 2005 at 4:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tim Buchheim

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.

May 26 2005 at 10:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
metachor

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!

May 26 2005 at 9:07 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Aaron Jacobs

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.

May 26 2005 at 9:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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