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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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Kerdan - Cambridge, MA (2 weeks ago)

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