When editing a particularly long line of text, I often wish I had a key that would put the cursor at the center of the line, the same way that Home and End do so for their respective positions. It could be a seventh key in the center of the six already above the arrow keys on a standard 101 (or 102) keyboard.

How are the Home and End keys interpreted? Would it be so hard to do some hackery that, when the Center key is pressed would count how many characters are in that line in a temporary long, put the cursor at the half-way point, then discard that long?

If M$ can push to get those $&)!% vulcan windows keys on *every* keyboard, this should fly, as it's more universal (and saner).
-- absterge, Apr 26 2001

Try ctrl-[arrow key] to move quickly from word to word. Also, try hitting enter a little more often.
-- centauri, Apr 26 2001


but centauri, if the line is composed mostly of non-alpha characters, the ctl+arrow doesn't do a whole lot of good.
-- absterge, Apr 26 2001


...good point and even better idea. I use the ctrl+arrow key combo all the time and often wish there was a way to get to the middle of a sentence, especially when there are a lot of -- / + signs.
-- iuvare, Apr 26 2001


This is a bit of a different rant, but how the hell is the user supposed to know about the completely unintuitive ctrl-arrow combination? Is it usefully documented *anywhere* where it can be discovered before the fact? (No, Windows 3.1 manuals or "101 Tricks For Power Users" doesn't count.)
-- bookworm, Apr 26 2001


In UNIX text editors such as emacs and vi, you can define a macro to do this and bind it to a keystroke. I suspect you can also write a macro in VB Script to take you to the center of the line in MS apps. You could associate this behavior with one of the existing keys on the keyboard that you never use, such as scroll lock.
-- gjlee, Apr 26 2001


What is "scroll lock" anyway?

As for the rant about unintuitive keystrokes, 90% of anything that works on computers is counterintuitive anyway. All the rest works one way on one system and another way on another, or is different between programs. For instance, Home and End do the same thing in this little editor.
-- centauri, Apr 26 2001


//It kind of went out of style when the mouse became more predominant on PCs. A shame really, I liked that function and wish it was still used.//

The only program I use with any frequency that uses Scroll-Lock is PC-Write 3.0x (my preferred text editor). Over a decade old, it's still for many purposes my favorite. In PC-Write 3.0x, scroll-lock toggles between insert and overwrite mode (the insert key simply inserts one blank space without moving the cursor, making the sequence insert-down-insert-down quite handy).

For scrolling the screen without moving the position of the cursor within the text, ctrl-W and ctrl-Z work very nicely (for page-up and page-down I use ctrl-R and ctrl-C). Anyone know I can make the "newer" version of Microsoft's EDIT respond properly those time-honored keystrokes?
-- supercat, Jun 26 2001



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