OS X Keybinding Action Code

Xah Lee, 2007-12-30, 2010-06-15

This page lists the action codes for creating keybindings on OS X. See: Creating Keyboard Layout in Mac OS X. For how to represent the keys, see: OS X Keybinding Key Syntax.

Action Codes

Here is a list of commonly used actions.

Text insertion

/* insert a Unicode character that has hex code 03B1 */
("insertText:", "\U03B1");

The insertion can be a string (as opposed to a single char).

Cursor movement

moveUp:
moveDown:

moveLeft:
moveRight:

moveBackward:
moveForward:

moveWordBackward:
moveWordForward:

moveWordLeft:
moveWordRight:

pageUp:
pageDown:

moveToBeginningOfLine:
moveToEndOfLine:

"moveToBeginningOfParagraph:"
"moveToEndOfParagraph:"

moveToBeginningOfDocument:
moveToEndOfDocument:

Sample code:

{
"\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLine:"; /* home key */
"\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLine:"; /* end key */
}

Most (or all) of these actions also have a version with suffix “AndModifySelection”. For example, there's moveUpAndModifySelection, moveWordLeftAndModifySelection, moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection, etc. These are the same as moving cursor but also extend the selection.

For left-to-right languages, there's no difference between “moveLeft” and “moveBackward”. The “moveBackward” is for moving in the backward direction of the language flow.

Whenever there's a “Up”, there's also a “Down” version. Similarly, “Backward” with “Forward”, “Beginning” and “Ending”. In the following, these reverse versions omitted.

Moving the screen

scrollLineUp:
scrollPageUp:
center:

Text editing

deleteBackward:
deleteWordBackward:
deleteToBeginningOfLine:
deleteToBeginningOfParagraph:

copy:
cut:
paste:

undo:
redo:

setMark:
yank:
deleteToMark:
selectToMark:

selectWord:
selectLine:
selectParagraph:
selectAll:

insertText:
insertNewline:
insertLineBreak:

Text Transformation

capitalizeWord:
lowercaseWord:
uppercaseWord:

Common Mac Operations

newDocument:
openDocument:
checkSpelling:

saveDocument:
saveDocumentAs:
saveAllDocuments:
revertDocumentToSaved:
printDocument:

performZoom:
performClose:
performMiniaturize:
hide:

Sequence of Actions

You can create a sequence of actions, like this:

/* inserting pairs and move cursor in-between */
"~k" = ("insertText:", "()", "moveLeft:");

/* copy all file content */
"~c" = ("selectAll:", "copy:");