Moving The Caret

The simplest way to move the caret is to click the mouse at the desired location in the text area. The caret can also be moved using the keyboard.

The Left, Right, Up and Down keys move the caret in the respective direction, and the Page Up and Page Down keys move the caret up and down one screenful, respectively.

When pressed once, the Home key moves the caret to the first non-whitespace character of the current line. Pressing it a second time moves the caret to the beginning of the current line. Pressing it a third time moves the caret to the first visible line.

The End key behaves in a similar manner, going to the last non-whitespace character, the end of the line, and finally to the last visible line.

If there is a selection, Home and End behave the same as above, except that instead of operating on the current line, they move the caret to the first and last lines of the selection, respectively.

If soft wrap is enabled (see the section called "Word Wrap"), the first time they are pressed Home and End only go to the start and end of the current screen line; the second press moves to the start and end of the physical line.

Control-Home and Control-End move the caret to the beginning and end of the buffer.

More advanced caret movement is covered in the section called "Working With Words", the section called "Working With Lines" and the section called "Working With Paragraphs".