Those of us who do a lot of typing on Macs are familiar with a variety of keyboard shortcuts for navigating lines, words, and characters in text editors that use standard “Cocoa key bindings.”

Among those common keyboard shortcuts are cmd-arrow to move to the beginning or end of a line, and option-arrow to move between words in a sentence.

Starting in Lion, Apple fine-tuned the behavior by changing the definition of what constitutes a word delimiter for option-arrow navigation. While it used to stop on e.g. period-separated words, now it considers such chains.of.words to be a single “word.”  My friend Mike Ash noticed this and, when he complained about it to me, I set about finding a solution.

It turns out there’s a supported preference setting to alter this behavior. Look in your System Preferences under the Langage & Text pane, and you’ll find a “Word Breaks” setting with various options, including a special one just for nerds:

For most people, the “Standard” setting is probably the right choice. But computer programmers are far more likely to encounter words that are separated by syntactic characters such as periods, colons, etc. For us, it makes more sense to have the system pause at these word breaks than to breeze right by them.

Updates:

1. You should take note that after changing the setting, you won’t notice changes in applications until they have been quit and relaunched again.
2. As noted in the comments, this feature was apparently available in 10.6 as well, and was possible more along the lines of the default in 10.5 and previous. The growing consensus seems to be that it was in the update from 10.6 to 10.7 that a previous selection of this setting was not preserved.

I’m on the verge of a major move from New York back to the Boston area, but I wanted to get a quick release out to address some long-standing glitches in MarsEdit. These are the kinds of little issues that aren’t likely to cause major disruption for most users, but which are nonetheless infuriating if you happen to be affected by them.

• Fix issues that caused side-panels to shrink gradually when collapsed/expanded
• Fix a problem that prevented the width of the blogs list area from being restored across launches
• When main window’s preview is collapsed, it’s now kept collapsed when window size is increased
• Fix a crash that could occur when removing the last item from the Uploaded media list
• Fix a crash that could occur when “unsplitting” a post or searching/replacing in rich editing mode
• Fix a crash that could occur when authorizing Flickr

This update is available immediately from the MarsEdit home page. It will be available for update via the Mac App Store as soon as Apple approves the release.

After I get settled in to our new home in Boston, I hope to make a lot of progress on MarsEdit 3.4 and to continue chipping away at the long-longed-for MarsEdit Touch.

MarsEdit 3.3.3 is now available as a free update for registered MarsEdit 3 customers. Because of the relatively urgent nature of this update for Tumblr users, the direct-download version is being released before the Mac App Store has been approved by Apple. Mac App Store customers may download and run the direct-download version without restriction.

This update includes a change to improve the reliability of MarsEdit when posting to Tumblr. Previously, MarsEdit used an “API URL” for Tumblr that worked reliably, but which has recently been changed by Tumblr to fail with an error.

This release also includes a few other important fixes, so I recommend updating even if you are not a Tumblr user. Complete change list:

• Improve Tumblr posting reliability by switching to an API URL that is less likely to report “over capacity”
• Improve memory efficiency for post editor documents
• Improve reliability of setting and removing links on images in rich text mode
• The main window’s post list area now stays the same size while resizing window

This blog runs on WordPress, which has been a great solution for my needs. But as the developer of MarsEdit, you might guess I get the opportunity to see a whole heckuva lot of other systems, and sometimes find myself envious of their advantages, big and small.

One such advantage I noticed is that Squarespace users can log in from any page on their blog, just by pressing the escape key.

By default, WordPress requires that you either memorize the admin page URL, or list an ugly “Login” link i the blog’s template. I never liked the idea of having a login link for a site that only I should ever be logging in to, so for years I have omitted the login link from my site.

This means that when I’m reading comments or something on my site, and am not logged in, I have to do a silly dance before I respond or moderate a comment:

1. Go to the URL bar in my browser.
2. Change URL to /wp-admin/
3. Enter the proper login credentials.
4. Hit back button to get back where I was.
5. Reload the page to see the comment form as a logged-in user.

This ends today. My QuickLogin Plugin for WordPress is a drop-in solution that, when activated, gives your WordPress blog the same delicious escape-key behavior that Squarespace offers. Now when I am browsing my own blog and want to log in, I just press the escape key. After I authenticate, I’m automatically returned to the reloaded page I was viewing.