17

When I press ESC or F5 key in many windows (like Preview) of MacOS Yosemite (10.10.1), or El Capitan (10.11.5) an autocomplete menu appear, and sometimes auto insert the first word in the document I am, what is very inconvenient. It modifies PDF's, docs, and many other documents accidentally.

When I press ESC key

How can I disable it?

Cœur
  • 37,241
  • 25
  • 195
  • 267
Ricardo Martins
  • 5,702
  • 3
  • 40
  • 59
  • You might try a Mac keyboard remapping program (Karabiner seems promising). Working key remap software will allow you to remap the F5 key to generate a different key code, or no key code, at all. In addition to remapping the F5 key, you can also (re)assign the original F5 key code to another key entirely, or assign a key combination (for instance, make Alt+F5 send the original F5 key code). So, other than cost, the difference in key mapping software will probably come down to how flexible it is in remapping key codes to different keys and/or key combinations. – Andrew Dec 09 '15 at 17:32
  • Thankyou Andrew, but I didn't find anything in Karabiner that could help me on that. :( – Ricardo Martins Dec 09 '15 at 21:21
  • Sure thing. As, I said there are many products, Karabiner was free of course. There are numerous pay products under $10. You will have to investigate. – Andrew Dec 09 '15 at 21:29
  • Tried Calling Apple? –  Apr 25 '16 at 22:57
  • @DaniSpringer.com I didn't. Thanks for the suggestion. – Ricardo Martins Apr 25 '16 at 23:26

3 Answers3

4

As noted in another answer:

It's the auto completion from the built in spell checker and after a lengthy search I found the solution in Apples Discussion Forums:

defaults write -g NSUseSpellCheckerForCompletions -bool false

Afterwards restart affected programs and Esc just cancels searches again.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
0

I just recently encountered this problem as well. Note that this is only a partial solution.

If you want to assign a different functionality to the F5 key (which is what I wanted to do) then doing so will prevent it from triggering autocomplete. For example, I mapped F5 to Show Desktop (which was my goal anyway) in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Mission Control and now F5 doesn't trigger autocomplete.

This doesn't solve anything for escape though.

derpedy-doo
  • 1,097
  • 1
  • 18
  • 22
-2

I have found a simple fix for this problem. You'll notice a setting in the picture below that says "Correct spelling automatically." Disabling this prevents the ESC and F5 keys from activating an autocomplete popup. If you are in a browser or some other app that doesn't use autocorrect, just check it again but remember to uncheck when you don't want the behaviour.

Diable the box, checked by default.

samdoj
  • 144
  • 8
  • Didn't work anyway. My checkbox is already unchecked and the behavior persists in Preview and other apps. – Ricardo Martins Jun 15 '16 at 16:24
  • Furthermore, I can't know what other settings you have in play. The fact that it works for some means it doesn't deserve a downvote, and I am working very hard to increase my reputation. So the fact that it doesn't work for YOU is irrelevant. It does work. – samdoj Jun 15 '16 at 21:44
  • Sam, I recently formatted my macbook and it's already like this from the moment one. And the downvote is used when the answer doesn't help us or is not very relevant to the question. Don't take that in a personal way, or don't be hard with yourself on trying to help the community. It's just how it's supposed to be. – Ricardo Martins Jun 17 '16 at 12:10