2.6 Deleting and undoing

We mentioned deleting before in Section 2.4.5 (the exercises for Section 2.4), which of course simply involves pressing the Delete key, sometimes written as ⌫ (Table 2.1). As with Cut/Copy/Paste (Section 2.5), deletion is especially useful when combined with the selection techniques from Section 2.4.

In addition to the obvious technique of selecting and deleting text, on a Mac I especially like using ⌥⌫ to delete one word at a time. I’ll frequently use this combination if I need to delete a medium number of words (say 2–5) to restart a phrase when writing. For shorter deletion tasks, such as one word, it’s usually faster to hit ⌫ repeatedly, as context-switching to use ⌥⌫ incurs some overhead that makes it faster to just delete directly. Don’t worry too much about these micro-optimizations, though; with experience, as a matter of course you’ll come up with your own set of favorite techniques.

Paired with deletion is one of the most important commands in the history of the Universe, Undo. In modern editors, Undo uses the native keybinding, typically ⌘Z or ⌃Z. Its inverse, Redo, is usually something like ⇧⌘Z or ⌘Y. You can also use the menu (typically Edit, as seen in Figure 2.28), but, as with Cut/Copy/Paste (Section 2.5), Undo is so useful that I recommend memorizing the shortcut as soon as possible. Without Undo, operations like deletion would be irreversible and hence potentially harmful, but with Undo it’s easy to reverse any mistakes you make while editing.

Figure 2.28: Undo and Redo in the editor menu.

One practice I recommend is using Cut instead of Delete whenever you’re not 100% sure you’ll never want the content again. Although you can usually Undo your way to safety if you accidentally delete something important, putting the content into the buffer with Cut gives you an additional layer of redundancy. (Using Jumpcut (Section 2.5.1) gives you another layer still.)

Finally, Undo provides us with a useful trick for finding the cursor, a common task when editing larger files. The issue is that you’ll be writing some text and then need to move (Section 2.3) or find (Section 2.8) elsewhere in the document. On these occasions, it can be hard to relocate the cursor. There are several ways around this problem—you can move the arrow keys, or just start typing—but my favorite technique is to Undo and then immediately Redo (⌘Z/⇧⌘Z or ⌘Z/⌘Y), which is guaranteed to find the cursor without making any undesired changes.