Where is that damn oblique arrow on my Mac?

Here’s a question for the reader: When using IDEA on my MacBook Pro, I cannot find the key combination to “goto end of file” or “goto top of file”. It used to be Ctrl-End or Home on PC, as far as I remember. But, MacBook Pro users do not need Home and End keys, … or so it seems.

So, I went into IDEA settings for keyboard bindings and found what the picture below shows:

IDEA Keymap settings

First thing: I assume, that “Move Caret to Text End” is what I want, as in, other words for “goto file end”. Am I right?

Next thing: What the heck is that oblique arrow doing in the shortcut :-) I looked hard but could not find it on my MacBook Pro keyboard:

I then got to looking on the external keyboard for the mac of a colleague of mine, and spotted the keys on that keyboard, like here:

Is there any way for me to emulate these keybindings on my MacBook Pro, using some kind of weird and hard to remember combination of shift, fn, ctrl, option, arrows, command key or something completely different like a secret trackpad gesture?

April 4, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Uncategorized

4 Responses

  1. Steve - April 4, 2009

    When you’re done with that, good luck finding the ‘#’ key as well.

  2. Warren - April 5, 2009

    The icon is for the end key:

    http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html

    You can emulate end by pressing “fn” and the down arrow.

    Note that in most Mac applications, home and end go to the start and end of the file, like in browsers. The combination ⌘-left will bring you to the end of the line.

  3. polesen - April 5, 2009

    @steve: “#” is no problem – that is just Shift-3.

  4. polesen - April 5, 2009

    @warren: Thank you for that info!

    While fn-downarrow seems to work in mac programs ad end-of-file, it does not in IDEA. Guess it is just IDEA keybindings then.

Leave a Reply