Large text selection doesn't work

Question

In macOS, one can select text quickly and precisely using shortcuts.

Pressing SHIFT and the arrow keys will select one character at a time (← →) or one line (↑, ↓) at a time. And pressing ALT and SHIFT in combination with the arrow keys will let you select each word at a time (← →) or from the insertion point to the very beginning or end of a document (↑, ↓).

However, I am having a hard time making it work on a larger document:

Why isn't the shortcut working in the second situation?

Answer 1

⇧ shift ⌥ alt ↓ selects to the end of the paragraph. This works in your first example because the document contains a single paragraph.

The correct combination for selecting to the end of the document is either ⇧ shift ⌘ cmd ↓ or ⇧ shift end, depending on that particular application’s shortcut for scrolling to the end of the document.

Correspondingly, selecting to the beginning of the document is ⇧ shift ⌘ cmd ↑ or ⇧ shift ↖︎ home.

And finally selecting to the start of the line is ⇧ shift ⌘ cmd ←, and to the end of the line ⇧ shift ⌘ cmd →. Using ⌥ alt instead of ⌘ cmd selects the previous/next word, respectively.

Answer 2

I found out what I was doing wrong.

While working on the first document, I wrongly assumed that the shortcut to jump to the end of a document was SHIFT + ALT + ↓, because this shortcut selects the text till the end of the line, and the document was just one long line that wrapped.

But the actual shortcut to select till the end of the document and bypass linebreaks is SHIFT + CMD + ↓ - not ALT.