Command-line Keyboard Shortcuts
Just another installment of “How did I not know that already?”
Backstory
I came across a copy of the first edition of How Linux Works recently, and have been reading through it to see whether I missed anything important in my hodge-podge of formal and informal open source training.
It’s nice to be reassured that I have the right idea for all the basics that it’s covered so far. Along the way, it’s answering a few of those un-Googleable questions that aren’t really a big enough deal to warrant remembering to ask someone more knowledgeable about them.
Today I Learned
Ctrl+A jumps the cursor to the beginning of the line, and Ctrl+E jumps to the end. (The Home and End keys also work in my shell, but they’re slower and more awkward since they require moving one’s hands from home row)
Ctrl+W deletes the word in which the cursor is currently located (words being defined as strings separated by spaces), and Ctrl+U deletes the entire line.
Perhaps less usefully, there are also control characters to subsitute for arrow keys, with easy mneumonics for them:
| Sequence | Arrow | Mnemonic |
|---|---|---|
| ctrl+B | left | Back |
| ctrl+F | right | Forward |
| ctrl+P | up | Previous |
| ctrl+N | down | Next |
Other Relevant Facts
The book hasn’t covered these yet, but if the above was new to you, make sure you know these things too:
Ctrl+R enters reverse-i-search mode, in which you type any substring of the command you want. As you type, it will match the most recent command in which the thing you typed appears.
The up and down arrow keys scroll through your command history. Page-up jumps to the first command in your history, and page-down jumps to the last. All that history lives in ~/.bash_history by default, and the HISTFILESIZE and HISTSIZE options in ~/.bashrc configure how much history gets saved.
Ctrl+C kills the running program, Ctrl+D sends the EOF (end-of-file) character, and q quits you out of pretty much any program with : instead of your usualy $ prompt.