Word Completion in OS X

Here’s a little trick in OS X that I underuse: Hit F5 while typing a word in many Cocoa apps to get a list of suggested words.

This works in TextEdit, Mail, OmniFocus and Tweetbot.1 Unfortunately it does not work in Sublime Text or nvALT at all.

Actually, this command has several keyboard shortcuts that work in different apps:

⌘.(period)

ESC

F5

Only F5 works consistently for me in multiple applications. ESC is very unpredictably bound to other app functions.

It seems crazy that there are three different ways to trigger this shortcut in TextEdit but no documentation for it.

  1. BBEdit already has its own suggestion system built in but it uses the same keyboard trigger to show completions. ESC hides completions. ↩︎