Remapping the Home and End keys on OSX

The Problem

As I was pasting something into Chrome this morning, I, once again, expected the Home key to take me to the start of the URL. It. Did. Not. So I decided that I won’t be able to change this ingrained behaviour and need to fix it. First Google hit led me to a post by Damian Guard that I will be pasting below to keep as notes for myself. Everything from here on is from his post.

Make Home & End keys behave like Windows on Mac OS X

If, like me, you want Home to send you to the start of the line and not to the top of the document then create a file called DefaultKeyBinding.dict in your ~/Library/KeyBindings folder (might need to create that folder too) with the following contents:

{
    "\UF729"  = moveToBeginningOfParagraph:; // home
    "\UF72B"  = moveToEndOfParagraph:; // end
    "$\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfParagraphAndModifySelection:; // shift-home
    "$\UF72B" = moveToEndOfParagraphAndModifySelection:; // shift-end
    "^\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfDocument:; // ctrl-home
    "^\UF72B" = moveToEndOfDocument:; // ctrl-end
    "^$\UF729" = moveToBeginningOfDocumentAndModifySelection:; // ctrl-shift-home
    "^$\UF72B" = moveToEndOfDocumentAndModifySelection:; // ctrl-shift-end
}

This remapping does the following in most Mac apps including Chrome (some apps do their own key handling):

• Home and End will go to start and end of line
• Shift+Home and Shift+End will select to start and end of line
• Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End will go to start and end of document
• Shift+Ctrl+Home and Shift+Ctrl+End will select to start and end of document