I had almost gotten over my loss of an insert key when I switched to OS X. While Windows/Idea works magic all over with Alt+Insert Ctrl+N seemed to fit the bill on the Mac. Several months went by with my only feeling occasionally bother by no insert key. Somtimes I needed block copy while running Idea over a remote windows session. A quick trip to the edit menu was only mildly painful during these times. Today… today I’m trying to push a Tomcat bundle to a remote Linux server with no UI. I get the bundle over there and decide to disable the Tomcat manager in conf/tomcat-users.xml. I pull up vi because it’s the only Linux text editor I’ve taken any serious time to somewhat learn. (By that I mean I know how to insert characters, quit, and quit while writing changes to disk, nothing more.) Ah… a remote vi session from iTerm on my Mac, how nice! Now lets change the document and… hey!!! WTF???!! How do I get into insert mode???!!!
Can’t see nothing but the source code
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By pressing for instance ‘i’…
By: Kristian on March 26, 2008
at 4:23 pm
Thx Kristian! My coworker told me the same thing earlier… Still good things to know. I’m losing what little Linux knowledge I’d picked up at my last job. I gotta get Mint installed correctly!
By: Cliff on March 26, 2008
at 7:08 pm
[...] Windows key, Alt+Tab works correctly, Ctrl copy/paste works, multi-select, just about everything except an insert key. (If you’re on a MacBook Pro you have to remember the trick with the fn+delete to get a true [...]
By: Unbelievable… « Can’t see nothing but the source code on April 1, 2008
at 8:41 am
I had the problem with the insert key when I used the statistic software SAS9 with my MAC on a Linux Cluster.
For me the combination fn+ctrl x worked.
Cheers,
David
By: Dave on June 14, 2008
at 2:52 am
Insert: fn+return
Alt+Insert: fn + alt/option + return
By: Brazilian on October 3, 2008
at 3:25 pm
Is that so? It doesn’t seem to work on my Mac.
By: Cliff on October 4, 2008
at 7:07 pm
CTRL T
By: Alex on January 30, 2009
at 4:50 am
Ctrl+T is working in iTerm and in Terminal too.
Thank you Alex!
By: Andor on October 19, 2009
at 6:26 am
None of these suggestions work on my Mac either. Although I do think it’s my keyboard, because I need the insert key a couple of times a year, and I have not had this much trouble.
By: Karen Plaza on April 20, 2009
at 10:48 am
My biggest hangup was IntelliJ. After getting used to Alt+Insert as the magic do-everything key I felt lost on the Mac… constantly grabbing the rat and lining up the pointer for something that should happen by reflex. Since I’ve posted Idea has released v8.1 and now it seems that Ctrl+N fills the Alt+Insert void for us Mac users. (Though I haven’t been as deep in Idea doing more work in Eclipse and XCode.) The other issue I had was in vi where someone graciously pointed out the ‘t’ key puts you into insert mode as well. So now I believe I can live without insert.
By: Cliff on April 21, 2009
at 8:08 am