Speed up your text navigation, selection and deletion with the Alt key

This is a basic tip that is extremely powerful if you work a lot with long text. All the basic text navigation functions work one character at a time, such as arrow left and right to move the cursor, with shift and arrow to select text and the backspace and delete buttons to delete text left and right to the cursor. If you press the Alt button you will change these behaviors from one character to one full word plus the space behind it. Here is the full list of functions:

• Left/right arrow moves the cursor one character left and right.
• Shift and left/right arrow selects text increasingly by one character.
• Alt and left/right arrow moves the cursor one word left and right.
• Alt, Shift and left/right arrow selects text increasingly by one word.
• Backspace/delete deletes one character to the left or to the right of the cursor.
• Alt and backspace/delete deletes one word to the left or to the right of the cursor.

Don't forget that with the Alt key you can also select a text area freely.