KEYBOARD NERD FILTER: What are some tips for ultra-efficient text manipulation within a document (a la vi's H-J-K-L or Raskin's LEAP idea) in OS X?

I use emacs, it has keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and allows you to use vi movement keys if you want. Per your example, to cut the next 3 words I'd hit C-space, M-f, M-f, M-f, C-w, where C is control and M is meta (alt on modern keyboards)- C-space starts highlighting, M-f moves you forward one word, and then C-w yanks the text. To past you hit C-y. To delete everything to the end of the line C-k. There are a zillion of these, and they all make sense (to me at least: Y to yank, a to goto start of line, k to kill...). I also find it pretty easy to get started in, as there are good guides, and you can use the GUI until you find yourself doing stuff enough you want to learn the shortcut for it. You can also easily write macros if you are doing the same thing over and over again. There is also a very good version of it for Mac (Or so I'm told; I'm a hater) called Aquaemacs.

Awesome suggestion ConstantineXVI, but unfortunately because I'm editing articles for a journal, I need to maintain a revision history, so .DOC files it is... Very cool link, though. Are there any utilities that add more vim or emacs-type capabilities to GUI text editors (like Word) in OS X? Finding KeyRemap4MacBook changed the way I used OS X...

@phaedrus441: Why don't you use a revision system like Git or Mercurial then? You could commit each change, and then would have a much more comprehensive log of what you've changed. Sorry, I only know about stuff for windows and linux. You might find the answers in this thread useful, hhttp://stackoverflow.com/questions/162896/emacs-on-mac-os-x-leopard-key-bindings

Oh, here are some additional guides that might help you: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070215034801484 http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-word/ http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/EventOverview/TextDefaultsBindings/TextDefaultsBindings.html I don't know exactly which applications for mac are written using those APIs, but I have to imagine there is something you can use.

You could use http://startly.com/products/quickeys/mac/4/ to make a single shortcut that, when activated by a certain keystroke, would press "'s'+'d'+'shift'+'option' (4 KEYS!) and then tap the 'l' key three times." You could also use http://www.boastr.de/ to activate that QuicKeys shortcut with a touchpad gesture, which is just too cool for words. As far as I'm concerned, both of these programs are individually great, and they work great together for incredible efficient control of your mac.

Whoa, these are awesome responses! Canageek, great links! As for using Git or Mercurial, the problem is that I'm basically sent huge numbers of Word documents that I review/rewrite/translate and then return them. At which point, my changes are reviewed by their staff... Zachawry, I *love* BetterTouchTool-- the Window snapping with hotkeys is amazing on a big monitor.

http://www.viemu.com/ claims to do this for a bunch of Microsoft products, but is spendy and Windows only.

Oh, one other thing you might be able to do is use Pages (which should be much more amenable to the cocoa solutions posted above) to edit the word documents. I have used track changes pretty seamlessly between Word and Pages on a Mac in the past.