Zloyprep wrote:
Somehow Escape button started bringing me an autocomplete list in Keynote which is monstrously inconvenient.
This is rather surprising.
What you are describing is a feature called "word completion", provided by the Cocoa text engine, and hence used by apps which rely on it, including iWork, TextEdit, and others. When you are typing, or the insertion point is in a suitable position, pressing ⎋, or ⌥⎋, or F5 brings up the word completion list. Of course, it only works if there are suitable words in the list. For instance, if you type "Schad", intending to write "Schadenfreude", you can press ⎋ as much as you wish and nothing will come up. But type "Zeit" and then ⎋, and you'll get "Zeitgeist" sure enough.
What is surprising is that you describe it as if you had just came across it, whereas it has been available for years (although I believe that originally it was activated only by ⌥⎋). iWork (including Keynote) is a little different, because, in addition to ⎋, ⌥⎋, and F5, word completion is also activated by ⌘⎋.
I don't know how to turn off this feature, if indeed it can be turned off.
Usually Escape would make me exit the text box
Is there any chance you mis-remember? The Keynote shortcut for exiting text editing and selecting the text box is ⌘↩ (command-return).