Reader Goobi wrote in reminding us of this neat little trick which I thought would make a great Mac 101. As you know OS X has a system-wide spell checker. What Goobi reminded us about is that you can access that spell checker to autocomplete words in any Cocoa text field (this only work in Cocoa applications). All you have to do is type a few letters and then hit Shift + F5. This will generate a drop-down list with all the words in the spell check dictionary that start with those letters.
A great way to use this is for words that you have a hard time remembering how to spell. For example, I can never remember how to render 'bourgeois' correctly. So here I just type in the first four letters, hit Shift + F5, then scroll down.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-19-2007 @ 6:15PM
Velourium said...
Same thing can be done with pressing the esc. key.
face
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7-19-2007 @ 6:28PM
Ron said...
On the MacBook, pressing shift-F5 only increases the volume (as if you didn''t press the shift key).
The ESC key combination works, and I think that's better anyways! Thanks, Velourium for updating that!
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7-19-2007 @ 6:47PM
mungler said...
Ron: on portable macs, by default, the F-keys dont do the F-key functions, they instead access hardware functions. to access the F-key function itself, hold the 'Fn' key.
so in this case, it would be Fn-Shift-F5.
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7-19-2007 @ 6:47PM
Will said...
Ron: That's because you have your keyboard settings so that the function keys control hardware functions. If you want to do a software command like this you have to hold fn. If you want you can change this behavior so that f-keys default to software and holding fn changes hardware settings by checking the appropriate box in the keyboard preference pane.
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7-19-2007 @ 7:28PM
Eric said...
Is there a way to edit the shortcut?
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7-19-2007 @ 8:54PM
Dmitry Chestnykh said...
ESCAPE from this Shift+F5! Esc.
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7-19-2007 @ 8:55PM
Dmitry Chestnykh said...
What about this: http://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/26/autocomplete-in-cocoa-applications/ ? :)
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7-19-2007 @ 9:53PM
Luigi193 said...
This is the best thing ever...I love you TUAW!!! HOLY CRAP!!!!!!
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7-19-2007 @ 10:43PM
niclet said...
Well, Shift+F5 (or Shift+Fn+F5) works better : for example, in text fields like the Safari's Google search at the top right window, if you hit Esc to complete a word, it will automatically reset the field, but Shift+F5 works ;)
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7-19-2007 @ 10:58PM
niclet said...
Ho! and don't mistake with Command+F5 which start Voiceover and will read every window title or text field, spell each letter you enter and tell every thing you do (try it if you never did, it's freaking !!!!). - Press again Command+F5 to turn it Off.
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7-19-2007 @ 11:40PM
Richard. said...
You can also Option + esc
I've been using that since Tiger was released.
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7-20-2007 @ 1:10AM
niclet said...
Option + esc, Mmmh thats good :)
Thanks Richard.
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7-20-2007 @ 3:40AM
Milind said...
Woohoo! I finally made it to TUAW after years and years of trying! Now I'm famous!
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7-20-2007 @ 6:46AM
dattebayo said...
You don't need to press shift f5, or on laptops fn shift f5. All you need to press is f5 or on laptops~ fn f5.
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7-20-2007 @ 1:24PM
macDONALDs said...
dont forget on those 'books u need to hold the [fn] key to do this!
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7-20-2007 @ 3:36PM
jason mark said...
Nice tip, but as a manager, I'm in Word, Entourage and (unfortunately) Filemaker 95% of the time, and this tip doesn't work for any of those.
I've been using Macs for 12+ years now, and I still can't remember what the silly difference is between a Coco and Carbon app is. As TUAW gets more users who aren't programmers and/or who are new to the Mac, I wonder if there's a way you guys can help people understand if a tip like this will be useful to them without having to try it out. For instance instead of saying "all coco apps" say something like "it works for coco apps (such as safari, apple mail, and text edit), but not on carbon apps (such as Microsoft Office)."
Just an idea... :)
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