I’ve been using macs for so long that it always comes as a bit of a surprise when I find out that there’s a really useful feature that I never had any idea existed. John Grubber at Daring Fireball points out that MacOS X has an auto-completion feature based on the built in spell checker1. You start typing a word in any cocoa text field and hit f5 and a popup menu appears with possible completions for the word. Grubber says that you are supposed to be about to use the escape key unless you are in a context where escape means cancel, but I haven’t been able to get it to work anywhere, which is too bad since I’m using a MacBook Pro and to access the f5 key I need to hold down the “fn” to switch the increase volume key into its alternate role as a function key. Maybe it’s configurable in system preferences. If I have to use two keys, I’d rather it be an easier key combo…
1 By the way can I say how much I love that there’s a built in spell checker. It’s the #1 reason I wish all applications would move over to being cocoa, so I can have one standard way of checking spelling in every single text box.
