How to move the cursor word by word in the OS X Terminal

Question

Out of the box you can use the quite bizarre Esc+F to move to the beginning of the next word and Esc+B to move to the beginning of the current word.

On Mac OS X - the following keyboard shortcuts work by default. Note that you have to make Option key act like Meta in Terminal preferences (under keyboard tab)

• alt (⌥)+F to jump Forward by a word
• alt (⌥)+B to jump Backward by a word

I have observed that default emacs key-bindings for simple text navigation seem to work on bash shells. You can use

• alt (⌥)+D to delete a word starting from the current cursor position
• ctrl+A to jump to start of the line
• ctrl+E to jump to end of the line
• ctrl+K to kill the line starting from the cursor position
• ctrl+Y to paste text from the kill buffer
• ctrl+R to reverse search for commands you typed in the past from your history
• ctrl+S to forward search (works in zsh for me but not bash)
• ctrl+F to move forward by a char
• ctrl+B to move backward by a char
• ctrl+W to remove the word backwards from cursor position

Here's how you can do it

By default, the Terminal has these shortcuts to move (left and right) word-by-word:

• esc+B (left)
• esc+F (right)

You can configure alt+← and → to generate those sequences for you:

• Open Terminal preferences (cmd+,);
• At Settings tab, select Keyboard and double-click ⌥ ← if it's there, or add it if it's not.
• Set the modifier as desired, and type the shortcut key in the box: esc+B, generating the text \033b (you can't type this text manually).
• Repeat for word-right (esc+F becomes \033f)

Alternatively, you can refer to this blog post over at textmate:

http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/

Switch to iTerm2. It's free and much nicer than plain old terminal. Also it has a lot more options for customization, like keyboard shortcuts.

Also I love that you can use cmd and 1-9 to switch between tabs. Try it and you will never go back to regular terminal :)

How to set up custom keyboard preferences in iterm2

• Install iTerm2
• Launch and then go to preference pane.
• Choose the keyboard profiles tab
• You will either need to copy the profile to something new and then delete the arrow key shortcuts such as ^+ Right/Left or if you don't care about a backup just delete them from the default profile.
• Next make sure your modified profile is selected (starred)

• Now choose the keyboard tab (very top row)

• Click on the plus button to add a new keyboard shortcut
• In the first box type CMD+Left arrow
• In the second box choose "send escape code"
• In the third box type the letter B

• Repeat with desired key combinations. escape+B moves one word to the left, escape+f moves one word to the right.
• you may also wish to set up cmd+d to delete the word in front of the cursor with escape+d

I often hit the wrong button (cmd / control / alt) with an arrow key and so i have my arrow key combinations with those buttons all set to jump forward and back words, but please do what fits you best.

Actually there is a much better approach. Hold option ( alt on some keyboards) and press the arrow keys left or right to move by word. Simple as that.

option←
option→

Also ctrle will take you to the end of the line and ctrla will take you to the start.

I have Alt+←/→ working: open Preferences » Settings » Keyboard, set the entry for option cursor left to send string to shell: \033b, and set option cursor right to send string to shell: \033f. You can also use this for other Control key combinations.

Actually it depends on what shell you use, however most shells have similar bindings. The bindings you are referring to (e.g. Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E) are bindings you will find in many other programs and they are used for ages, BTW also work in most UI apps.

Here's a look of default bindings for Bash:

Most Important Bash Keyboard Shortcuts

Please also note that you can customize them. You need to create a file, name as you wish, I named mine .bash_key_bindings and put it into my home directory. There you can set some general bash options and you can also set key bindings. To make sure they are applied, you need to modify a file named ".bashrc" that bash reads in upon start-up (you must create it, if it does not exist) and make the following call there:

bind -f ~/.bash_key_bindings

~ means home directory in bash, as stated above, you can name the file as you like and also place it where you like as long as you feed the right path+name to bind.

Let me show you some excerpts of my .bash_key_bindings file:

set meta-flag on
set input-meta on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set bell-style none
set print-completions-horizontally off

These just set a couple of options (e.g. disable the bell; this can be all looked up on the bash webpage).

"A": self-insert
"B": self-insert
"C": self-insert
"D": self-insert
"E": self-insert
"F": self-insert
"G": self-insert
"H": self-insert
"I": self-insert
"J": self-insert

These make sure that the characters alone just do nothing but making sure the character is "typed" (they insert themselves on the shell).

"\C-dW": kill-word
"\C-dL": kill-line
"\C-dw": backward-kill-word
"\C-dl": backward-kill-line
"\C-da": kill-line

This is quite interesting. If I hit Ctrl+D alone (I selected d for delete), nothing happens. But if I then type a lower case w, the word to the left of the cursor is deleted. If I type an upper case, however, the word to the right of the cursor is killed. Same goes for l and L regarding the whole line starting from the cursor. If I type an "a", the whole line is actually deleted (everything before and after the cursor).

I placed jumping one word forward on Ctrl+F and one word backward on Ctrl+B

"\C-f": forward-word
"\C-b": backward-word

As you can see, you can make a shortcut, that leads to an action immediately, or you can make one, that just inits a character sequence and then you have to type one (or more) characters to cause an action to take place as shown in the example further above.

So if you are not happy with the default bindings, feel free to customize them as you like. Here's a link to the bash manual for more information.