Doing a tab stop on a Mac

Question

so on Windows if you select a bunch of text lines, and press tab the text will move to the right, how can I do that on a Mac?

Answer 1

Entirely depends on the program - however most code text editors (eg. TextMate, TextWrangler etc.) accept the keyboard command Command-] to indent by one tab stop. More basic text editors such as TextEdit don't have any ability to indent at all (in Plain text mode - in rich text mode it turns it into a list).

Answer 2

As far as I know, Mac OS X's standard text-editing routines do not have a shortcut for block-indent. However, all worthwhile text editors support their own shortcuts for block-indent. You'll just need to look up how your favorite editor does it.

Answer 3

Mac OS has a very powerful text system, which allows you to define system-wide shortcuts that can do a lot. Here's a really nice overview.

The easiest way to edit the shortcuts is KeyBinding Editor. Here's a screen shot of it, with a keybinding to indent the current line on Tab

Save to ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict and the next time you launch any Cocoa app your new bindings will be active.