Auto complete text in OS X

If you haven’t realized yet that OS X has a host of hidden features that make lives easier than you need to bookmark our RSS feed. We’re constantly trying to shed some light on some of these things as we find them.

Did you know that you can auto complete words in OS X? Maybe you know how to spell the first four letters of a word, but have no idea how to complete that word. Well, you can pick your word from a list.

All you have to do is type out part of your word, hold down the shift key, and press F5 at the same time. If you’re using a newer keyboard, or a laptop keyboard that has an FN key on it you’ll need to push FN+Shift+F5.

Added Bonus:  Did you know you can auto complete stuff in terminal as well?  All you have to do is click the escape key twice and it will auto complete file names and directories so long as there’s no duplicate file.  If there is a duplicate it’ll match all the characters up until it’s not sure which file name you might want.  At that point just add the next character and hit escape again.  It will eventually auto complete the text for you.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio