When I was first starting out in software engineering, it felt like there was a never-ending barrage of tooling to learn. After more than a decade in CLI environments, I still find myself constantly learning new features and fun facts - but it’s fairly rare that I learn something new that I end up using day-to-day.
I wanted to share some things I learned at relatively late stages in the game that ended up being significant productivity boosters for me - perhaps some of them are well-known, but in the spirit of this XCKD, I hope that someone reading this might pick up something new.
Ctl-U to delete everything on the line before cursor.
Ctl-E to skip to end of line.
Ctl-A to skip to beginning of line.
Or, just use Home and End like they were intended! Kids these days….
These Ctrl keys are shortcuts from Emacs - there’s a Bash settings to switch to vi-mode if you so wish. Anyway, the first Emacs was written in 1981, probably on a PDP-11, which did not have Home and End! Same reason Neovim uses “yank” instead of “copy”.
ctrl-c/ctrl-vdid not exist as a shortcut back when vi was being written!I know you didn’t intend to be mean or anything, but maaaaaan kids these days don’t know their history (not entirely your fault, btw)😆
This tip is super useful to me because not everyone is using a PC. On a PC sure, I would use the Home and End keys all the time. Now I’m using a laptop as my main computer and the Home and End keys are in a weird position that even to this day, 4ish years of laptop use, I still have to actually look at the keys to find them.
That’s horrible for muscle memory, every time I switch desk/keyboard I have to re-learn the position of the home/end/delete/PgUp/PgDn keys.
I got used to
Ctrl-a/Ctrl-eand it became second nature, my hands don’t have to fish for extra keys, to the point that it becomes annoying when a program does not support that. Some mapCtrl-ato “Select all” so, for input fields where the selection is one line, I’d ratherCtrl-athenleft/rightto go to the beginning/end than fish forhome/end, wherever they are.Ctrl-y to paste what Ctrl-u deleted or cut
Alt-deletedeletes the whole word before cursorAlt-ddeletes the whole word after cursorCtrl-kdeletes (kill) everything after the cursorWhatever is deleted is stored in the “killring” and can be pasted(yanked) back with
Ctrl-y(like someone else already mentioned), consecutive uses ofAlt-delete/Alt-dadd to the killring.Alt-b/Alt-fmoves one word backwards / forwardsAlt-tswaps (translocates) the current word with the previous oneCtrl-_undo last edit operationAll those bindings are the same as in emacs.
Also, normally
Ctrl-dinserts the end-of-file character, and typically can be used to close an active shell session or when you have some other interpreter open in the terminal for interactive input.ctrl-b: move cursor back one character
ctrl-f: move cursor foward one character
ctrl-d: delete character under cursor
But that’s more key presses than just using existing keys
I find it easier using my pinky to hit ctrl than taking my fingers off the home row to use the arrow keys.