12 Keyboard Shortcuts for Navigating & Selecting Text in Mac OS X

Work with text often? You can navigate, select, and manipulate text faster than ever before by remembering these twelve keyboard shortcuts.

6 Text Navigation Shortcuts

The first group of keyboard shortcuts allow for quickly moving around text:

• Jump to beginning of a line – Command+Left Arrow
• Jump to end of a line – Command+Right Arrow
• Jump to beginning of current word – Option+Right Arrow
• Jump to end of current word – Option+Right Arrow
• Jump to beginning of all text – Command+Up Arrow
• Jump to end of all text – Command+Down Arrow

By adding a shift key to the above shortcuts, we are given six new tricks that allow for quick text selection of lines, words, and entire documents.

6 Text Selection Shortcuts

The next group of keyboard shortcuts allow for quickly highlighting and selecting elements of text:

• Select text to beginning of a line – Shift+Command+Left Arrow
• Select text to end of a line – Shift+Command+Right Arrow
• Select text to beginning of current word – Shift+Option+Right Arrow
• Select text to end of current word – Shift+Option+Right Arrow
• Select text to beginning of all text – Shift+Command+Up Arrow
• Select text to end of all text – Shift+Command+Down Arrow

These shortcuts should work in all versions of Mac OS X and with all Cocoa based apps, including Safari, Chrome, TextEdit, Pages and the iWork suite, and most other Mac apps and text editors.

Update: These keyboard shortcuts will also work with iOS devices that have a keyboard attached via Bluetooth or through a dock. Thanks for pointing this out Steve!

Source from: http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/23/keyboard-shortcuts-to-navigate-select-text-mac-os-x/