When you use a well-designed computer program, you’ll occasionally stumble upon amazing little touches that you never noticed before. It is the mark of something well-crafted that it gives you what you need in an intuitive way and hides complexity under the surface so that as you use it more you gain additional functionality without additional confusion. How marvelous, then, when I discovered a few days ago — purely by accident — that most applications built natively for OS X support built-in functionality for auto-completion of words by using the escape key. Just another little design flourish that makes me a happier and more productive Mac user.
Aside
It’s really too bad this feature won’t work in (the non-Cocoa) Word – that’s where I do most typing of words with wonky spellings. Maybe I’ll start writing my papers in LaTeX in BBEdit…
Alas, BBEdit doesn’t support it either. And Gruber’s write-up is correct in that it can be a bit confusing to use other places, for example in Safari form fields F5 (or Fn-F5 on a laptop) works, but Esc does not. Mapping the behavior to an easier to use key like escape wasn’t a bad idea, but if it can’t work consistantly because escape is mapped to various other things, it might not have been the best.
I wonder if I can bring myself to write papers in TextEdit…
…and whether or not OSX will autocomplete things like “wh-island”, “N-drop”, and “morphosyntactic”. Guess it won’t be as helpful for my thesis as I thought…