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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields System
Have you ever wanted to type a Tab character, or a carriage return (line break), into a text field, but it either tabs to the next field, or hits the default button (i.e. "OK"), respectively? A good example is TextEdit's Find dialog. With TextEdit open, type a Tab or Return character into a document, select it, then copy it. Now you can paste your special character into a text field.

The only use I can think of with this is a query (and also replace). You can even do it in the Finder when naming a file/folder, but you get an error. Tab and Return would make good text snippets; I just tested this with Butler, and it worked.
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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: pastor on Aug 31, '06 07:56:39AM

Try it with alt+Tab or alt+Return. It works in many cases (so f.e. in TextEdit).



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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: unforeseen:X11 on Aug 31, '06 08:56:26AM

Right, works most of the time with the option (ALT) key.

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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: zpjet on Aug 31, '06 09:19:35AM

cheers, i've been copying the tab and return very often, thanks for nice hint!



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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: osxpounder on Aug 31, '06 11:55:03AM

Still a good tip to know if you use Witch [which I do], which uses alt-Tab to switch among windows. Thanks!



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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: arasinen on Aug 31, '06 09:45:33AM

In addition to Option+Return or +Tab, you can try Ctrl-Q followed by Return or Tab. You can also try a bunch of other keys, such as Backspace or Esc.

Such a combination has been used in the Unix-world, which is probably why you can find it in OS X.

As for uses... I've used a line feed occasionally in ichat. Tab is good when telling someone about a problem in source code, for example.

Backspace is quite nifty. You can for example type "th<backspace>ree", which when pasted into Terminal yields "tree".



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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: boxcarl on Aug 31, '06 11:20:09AM

This is a technique I've been using a lot as a poor man's regexp.

For example let's say you have a list of words separated by spaces, and you want to make it separated by line breaks. Well, that's easy enough, just find and replace all for the space character to a line break.

OK, well what if you have that same text, but now you realize you want a star in front of every line of text? Simple, select from the end of one line to the beginning of another, copy that and put it into the find and replace fields, then at the end of the replace field, add a star. Go back and add a star to the first line and you're all set.

Other useful functions: changing a bunch of text so that there are two line breaks between paragraphs instead of one, making sure there's only one space between words instead of two, reformatting an HTML list to match some template you've made (I often change iPhoto's output page to use CSS instead of tables)…



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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: phil4u2 on Aug 31, '06 06:30:59PM

if you use Ms Word, a tab = ^t and return = ^p
if you use BBEdit, a tab = \t and return = \p

very useful in "search & replace"



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Paste Tab and Return characters into text fields
Authored by: ottonomy on Sep 01, '06 09:55:58PM

In the OS9 days, pasting a carriage return or two into the beginning of a file name was a great invisible way to make the file rank higher alphabetically in a folder. My initial searches for hints have not revealed a way to do this in OS X. I would be happy to be corrected.



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