Switching to Mac, take #1

The Macintosh computer first came out, with a memory capacity of 128K, in 1984. I purchased my first Mac, with 512K of memory and a pinwheel-drive matrix printer, in 1985 or 86. It was powered by a large and heavy uninterruptible powersupply, or UPS, containing an iron-core transformer. In 1989 I purchased a more powerful SE30 with a 10M external hard disk and a portrait-style A4 screen. Each item represented a significant investment. Indeed the first two were made with the aid of bank loans. To protect my investment, the hardware was covered by insurance policies for theft, breakage and lightning damage, my house and office being in a rural area.

Earlier this month, after my new Asus laptop died just six months after the guarantee had expired and some serious frustration with Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 365, I decided to switch back to Mac, specifically a MacBook Pro. Fearing that it would take some time to bring my keyboard reflexes up to speed and more still to become familiar with all the new software, I would not have given the switch a moment's thought had I been working full time. But, being mostly retired, I saw the transition as a challenge.

I have now been playing around with my MacBook Pro and LibreOffice Writer for two weeks. I'm making reasonable progress but my keyboard reflexes and software skills still leave a lot to be desired. Amazingly, I have yet to work out how to select text then extend the selection one word at a time using the keyboard rather than the mouse or touchpad in Writer, Mail, or any of the other apps I use.

I suspected before making the switch that dtSearch does not work on Mac, nor anything like it and that the same is true of IWS. For further details, see dtSearch + IntelliWebSearch, take #2. In a private emails, David Thede, the author of dtSearch (hence the 'dt' in the name), and Michael Farrell, the author of IWS, confirmed that their products are not compatible with Mac, that no Mac versions and planned, and, worst news of all, that they knew of no comparable products that run under the MacOS.

Has my use of dtSearch and IWS won more admirers, others might have joined me in the quest for the best alternatives on Mac.

So far, I have found only HoudahSpot for harddisk-wide searches, but so far it appears to be a very poor second to dtSearch. To make better use of the keyboard and shortcuts, I am exploring  PhraseExpress and Keyboard maestro.

* Finally found out how to select or deselect the next word. Amazed that this was so difficult to find.
** The command I'm now looking for is how to get the cursor to return to where it was before moving it to somewhere else to, say, select some text.