If you’ve ever needed to select and copy portions of a text document that are non-contiguous, in other words, sentences or words that are not right next to one another and do not touch, you can do so with a little-known text selection shortcut trick in Mac OS X.
How to Select Noncontiguous Text on the Mac
The secret to selecting text blocks that do not touch is with the Command key. Simply hold down the Command key while making text selections in a text editor or word processing app and you can make selections of the text, even if it doesn’t touch. Once the non-contiguous text has been selected, you can copy, cut, paste, or modify the text like any other text block.
The ability to select noncontiguous text in OS X is demonstrated in the video below:
The ability to select any non-contiguous sections of text by holding down the Command key while making selections in text and word processing applications works in most apps, as long as they support the function. That latter part is important because this incredibly useful feature comes with a catch; not all Mac applications support the non-contiguous text selection trick in OS X. With that said, almost all word processors on the Mac do support non-contiguous text selection, including Pages, Microsoft Office, TextEdit, and many other third party apps.
In the included screenshots, the feature is being used in TextEdit.
This works with virtually every version of OS X regardless of what Mac it’s running on. Want to learn some additional text selection tricks? Then check these out to be a pro text editor and manager on the Mac!
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