Why aren't end and home universal?

[SirCastor]

I've noticed, much to my growing shagrin that the end and home keys are not universally utilized in OS X apps. Nor were they in 9, but since this is a X forum...

Shouldn't they be? I'm no programmer, so I don't know how difficult it would be to implement this, but I imagine that text fields are more or less the same in most apps, probably written with the same generic object.

So far the only mainstream app I've seen that touches these keys is MS Office.

Kinda frustrating to not be able to move to the beginning or end of a line. (I sorta picked up this habit from work, on Windows... sigh)

[smeger]

I don't know why they're not implemented by default in text fields. Probably because on Macs, the behaviour is different from the default Windows behaviour.

On windows, home & end take you to the beginning and end of the line, while ctrl-home & end take you to the beginning/end of the document. On Macs, home & end take you to the beginning/end of the doc. So it doesn't make much sense for a single-line text field to implement them.

But, you can use up arrow & down arrow to move to the beginning & end in a single-line text field.

[Ibson]

On the Mac, Command-Left Arrow moves to the start of the line, Command-Right Arrow moves to the end of the line. Home or Command-Up Arrow move to the beginning of a document, while End or Command-Down move to the end of a document.

[SirCastor]

Originally posted by Ibson:
On the Mac, Command-Left Arrow moves to the start of the line, Command-Right Arrow moves to the end of the line. Home or Command-Up Arrow move to the beginning of a document, while End or Command-Down move to the end of a document.

Wow... there it is. Hmm. Y'know, having been a Mac user all my life I would expect that I would have known that, but I didn't.

Learn a new thing every day I guess. Thanks!

[K++]

Also in a single line test input up and down will get you the front and back of said line. Even in multiple line files reppeated pressing of said you keys will get you to the same places. And this is universal, plus home and end makes no sense for this functionality, so there.

[Camelot]

Originally posted by Ibson:
On the Mac, Command-Left Arrow moves to the start of the line, Command-Right Arrow moves to the end of the line. Home or Command-Up Arrow move to the beginning of a document, while End or Command-Down move to the end of a document.

... except in a MS Office document.

Word, for example, defines Command-Left and Command-Right as moving back or forward one word, not to the beginning/end of the line.

Go Figure.

The short answer is that it's programer-dependent.

There may well be an Apple UI Guideline about home and end key implementations but I'm guessing 99% of programmers haven't read it since its not core to their application.