Shortcuts

These shortcuts are provided by the readline library, so any shell using readline (e.g. Bash, zsh, etc) should provide these.

Terminology

• M-<key> - indicates a key combination with the Meta key
  • Meta is usually bound to the Alt key
  • On macOS, the built-in Terminal program allows you to bind Meta to Option
• C-<key> - indicates a key combination with the Control key
• Kill - delete text and put it in the kill ring
• Kill ring - readline's variant of a clipboard with multiple temporary buffers
• Yank - paste the top of the kill ring at the cursor

Movement

• M-f - move forward one word
• M-b - move back one word
• C-f - move forward one character
• C-b - move back one character
• C-a - move to the start of the line
• C-e - move to the end of the line

Text editing

• M-d - kill one word forward
• C-w - kill one word backward
• C-u - kill from the cursor to the beginning of the line
• C-k - kill from the cursor to the end of the line
• M-l - make the word after the cursor lowercase
• M-u - make the word after the cursor uppercase
• C-y - yank the top of the kill ring after the cursor
• M-y - if you've just yanked, use this to cycle through the kill ring

Numeric arguments

Most of Bash's movement and text editing commands take a numeric argument to repeat the command that many times. You issue the numeric argument before the command with M-<n>, where <n> is a number.

Examples:

• M-2 M-d - kill two words forward
• M-3 C-w - kill three words backward

You can also supply a negative argument to most commands that operate forward or backward, which will reverse the direction of the command. I've never found that very useful, but it's neat to understand what happens when you accidentaly combine Meta and -.

• M-(-) 2 M-d - kill two words backward

It's also possible to just repeat characters.

• M-50 b - repeat the character b 50 times