If you hold command and press the left or right cursor, it takes you to the end of a line. With up or down it takes you to the top or bottom of everything that you've typed in. If you hold shift at the same time it highlights everything, making for easy deletion of the entire thing, or just one line.

If you want to do just a word, or a few, hold option, instead, and press left or right to move the cursor one word at a time. Once again, hold shift to highlight words as you do it.

The cool thing about these commands is that they work in every single text area throughout the system, (at least so far as I have noticed) including the Safari address and search bars. I find this helpful for getting rid of the end part of addresses if it auto-recognizes past the home page.

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don't forget that command-z undoes the most recent rant/ode/shameful-teenage-poem-scribed-in-a-minute too, if you don't like to hit comm-a, delete

you can hit Command+A and then just type and it'll automatically replace the existing text. you don't need to hit Delete after Command+A.

shift + up-arrow = select the line... delete/retype and you're there... all with just using the right hand... works faster for me anyway

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-what the f**k did I do now?!

Man, now I have a reason to practice using that shift key on the right side of the keyboard. :-)

I didn't even know emacs key bindings worked outside of...emacs.

Neat.

Oh, I forgot to mention that accesskey support in Safari (et.al.) uses a "control-" character prefix that can annoyingly interfere with your preferred Emacs-style key bindings. A common example is to type control-p during text input on some forum and have it activate the accesskey for "preview post" instead of moving the input cursor to the previous line. And sometimes an accesskey can accidentally invoke the "submit post" function, which can be embarrassing (or worse) when you can't delete or edit such a post.

I've argued that the choice to use the control key as the accesskey prefix on OS X is a poor one because of that issue, especially since the Cocoa bindings predate it. Until there's a user-defined accesskey prefix (or some other fix) my workaround for that infuriating conflict is a PithHelmet machete script that kills all accesskeys in Safari.

I want vi key bindings!

Using vi bindings in this context would require entering a mode so single characters would navigate instead of being inserted into the text, then exiting that mode when you're done. That quickly becomes more tedious than the simply adding a modifier key prefix like control or option to characters when you want emacs-style navigation. And emacs bindings are more like traditional Apple shortcuts than vi bindings will ever be. :-)

While ctrl-k is good for deleting from the curser position to the end of line, why combine that with ctrl-a when there is a perfectly serviceable method that requires only one key combination, not two.

You can use ctrl-u to delete from the curser position to the beginning of the line. If you're in the middle of the line you can use ctrl-u and ctrl-k to delete the entire line, or first move your cursor to the end of the line with ctrl-e and then use ctrl-u.

Control-u doesn't do a "kill-whole-line" in iChat for me. Maybe you're thinking of how it commonly behaves in interactive shells (bash, tcsh, zsh)?

I use command-a then command-x to clear the field myself, or just command-a then start typing if I want to rewrite the sentence. It's handy if I change my mind a few messages later, because command-v brings back what I erased.