Filed under: Productivity, Tips and tricks, Mac 101
Mac 101: Shift + F5 Autocomplete
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Velourium said 6:15PM on 7-19-2007
Same thing can be done with pressing the esc. key.
face
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Ron said 6:28PM on 7-19-2007
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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mungler said 6:47PM on 7-19-2007
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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Will said 6:47PM on 7-19-2007
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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Eric said 7:28PM on 7-19-2007
Is there a way to edit the shortcut?
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Dmitry Chestnykh said 8:54PM on 7-19-2007
ESCAPE from this Shift+F5! Esc.
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Dmitry Chestnykh said 8:55PM on 7-19-2007
What about this: http://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/26/autocomplete-in-cocoa-applications/ ? :)
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Luigi193 said 9:53PM on 7-19-2007
This is the best thing ever...I love you TUAW!!! HOLY CRAP!!!!!!
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niclet said 10:43PM on 7-19-2007
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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niclet said 10:58PM on 7-19-2007
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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Richard. said 11:40PM on 7-19-2007
You can also Option + esc
I've been using that since Tiger was released.
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niclet said 1:10AM on 7-20-2007
Option + esc, Mmmh thats good :)
Thanks Richard.
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Milind said 3:40AM on 7-20-2007
Woohoo! I finally made it to TUAW after years and years of trying! Now I'm famous!
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dattebayo said 6:46AM on 7-20-2007
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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macDONALDs said 1:24PM on 7-20-2007
dont forget on those 'books u need to hold the [fn] key to do this!
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jason mark said 3:36PM on 7-20-2007
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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