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After purchasing a new computer (Mac Mini w/Lion) and migrating my settings from old one (Macbook Pro w/Snow Leopard), the system shortcuts for beginning-of-line and end-of-line text navigation commands (Cmd-left/right arrow) just don't work anymore, anywhere.

Curiously, this happens only in a single user account, and in other accounts on the same computer it's OK. Other shortcuts with the Command key (like Cmd-up) also work just fine.

I have browsed through the keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard. I also have KeyRemap4Macbook installed and browsed through its settings, to no avail. There is no Keybindings folder in my ~/Library, either.

Anybody have any idea how to even start debugging this problem?

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    See also Command+right/left stopped working. (It's not an exact duplicate since the problem was that the shortcuts stopped working only occasionally.) – Lri Mar 24 '12 at 9:22
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    Thanks for the link to that question! It made me browse through the system shortcuts again, and lo and behold - Cmd+Left & Cmd+Right were indeed in plain sight as shortcuts for "Move Left a Space" and "Move Right a Space" - I didn't even look there before because I did not use Spaces at all in Snow Leo, and so I assume these shortcuts were inactive. Now the upgrade to Lion and Mission Control activated them, but I still had only one space so they did nothing. – ttarchala Mar 24 '12 at 18:34
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I remember having the same problem in some apps after upgrading to Lion. A reboot fixed it for me.

Workaround: use Ctrl+A (instead of ⌘+←) to move the cursor to the beginning of the line and Ctrl+E to move the cursor to the end of the line (instead of ⌘+→). This works in all Cocoa-based applications.

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  • Thanks for your answer, I know of the workaround but of course it would be nice to be able to go back to the shortcuts that are in my muscle memory after so many years... – ttarchala Mar 23 '12 at 13:48
  • Did you try a reboot? Did you use Software Update until you’re on the latest version (10.7.3)? – Mathias Bynens Mar 23 '12 at 13:55
  • Yes, absolutely, I have restarted a couple of times already since first noticing this symptom. I'm also upgraded to the latest Lion available, 10.7.3. – ttarchala Mar 23 '12 at 16:02
  • Usually the ⌘ key is represented as @ in dictionary files. It might help running grep -I "@" ~/Library/Preferences/* and you might find some settings that are not listed in the Keyboard Preferences. The -I option in the command tells it to ignore binary files, in case you are not familiar with this. – ismail Mar 23 '12 at 16:52
  • Note: ⌃A and ⌃E are not equivalent to ⌘← and ⌘→. The former go to the beginning/end of the whole line (paragraph), while the latter take word-wrapping into account in Cocoa text fields. – jtbandes Mar 24 '12 at 20:55
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Thanks to the commenter Lri for pointing to this question: Command+right/left stopped working! It made me browse through the system shortcuts again, and lo and behold - Cmd+Left & Cmd+Right were indeed in plain sight as shortcuts for "Move Left a Space" and "Move Right a Space" - I didn't even look there before because I did not use Spaces at all in Snow Leo, and so I assumed these shortcuts were inactive. Now the upgrade to Lion and Mission Control activated them, but I still had only one space so they did nothing.

So it was enough to actually redefine them to something else to regain the beginning/end-of-line functionality.

Sorry everyone for misleading with the wrong information (turns out I did not actually browse through all possible shortcuts...)

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