KDE Standards - Cursor Keys

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Cursor Keys

In editors and word-processors, the caret marks the location at which editing commands will take effect. Cursor keys allow the user to move the caret, scroll a graphic window, select list items, etc.

(The caret is also known as the text-cursor. Note that the mouse-pointer is also referred to as cursor. This is the reason the term caret is used insted of cursor in this document.)

Key	Movement	Movement with Ctrl pressed additionally
Left	Move left one unit, e. g., character	Move left one proportionally larger unit, e. g., one word
Right	Move right one unit	Move right one proportionally larger unit
Up	Move up one unit, e. g., line	Move up one proportionally larger unit, e. g., to the previous paragraph
Down	Move down one unit	Move down one proportionally larger unit, e. g., to the next paragraph
Home	Move to the left-most position, e. g., to the beginning of a line	Move to the top-most position, e. g., to the beginning of document
End	Move to the right-most position, e. g., to the end of a line	Move to the bottom-most position, e. g., to the end of document
Page Up	Move up one screen	Move up one logical screen, e. g., to the previous page
Page Down	Move down one screen	Move down one logical screen, e. g., to the next page

Example

For example, take a postscript viewer, which displays the pages of a postscript document. The program might not always be able to show a complete page on the screen, so it shows only a part of the page and provides a scrollbar to scroll the page up and down. To make navigation easier, all the pages are stacked vertically, so that scrolling one page down enough will get you to the top of page two.

This application might have the following key-bindings:

Page Down	will scroll the pages so that one or more of the lines visible at the bottom of the screen will appear at the top of the screen after scrolling.
Page Up	will scroll the pages so that one or more of the lines visible at the top of the screen will appear at the bottom of the screen after scrolling.
Ctrl+Page Down	will show the next postscript page.
Ctrl+Page Up	will show the previous postscript page.

(Screen refers here to the visible area of the document.)

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