Reader Steve Sawula is confused by the purpose of his keyboard’s Home and End keys. He writes:
On a Windows based PC, if you place your cursor in the middle of a typed sentence and press the End key, the cursor will jump to the end of that line. Conversely if you press the Home key, the cursor will jump to the beginning of the line. However, when I try to do either of these on my iMac G5 the cursor remains where it is. Can you please tell me how I can simulate the function I described on my Dell? What are the End and Home keys supposed to do on the Mac?
On the Mac the functionality of the Home and End keys isn’t consistent across applications. For example, these keys work as you describe in Microsoft Office applications, but don’t work in TextEdit.
The consistent keyboard shortcuts for placing the cursor at the beginning and end of a line are Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow, respectively.
If you’d like your cursor to jump to the beginning or end of your document, try Command-Home and Command-End, respectively.