Filed under: OS, Odds and ends
Tiger Bits: Autocomplete in Cocoa Applications
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron Jacobs said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
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.
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metachor said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
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!
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Tim Buchheim said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
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.
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iFelix said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
I lick this feather, it makes typhoid on my Powerhouse much easing.
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Callum said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
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?
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James said 4:19PM on 6-16-2005
This strikes me as something that would be most useful in a device which is operated without a physical keyboard... like perhaps a tablet?
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Van Daniel said 2:12PM on 8-16-2005
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.
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Van Daniel said 2:12PM on 8-16-2005
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...
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