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Navigating and Editing the Command

Line – Bash Edition
SUNDAY. DECEMBER 30, 2018 - 4 MINS

COMMAND LINE BASH FIELD NOTES ENGLISH

A cheat sheet for moving around and editing your command line – Bash
Edition.

Moving Around the Command Line

Editing Commands in the Command Line
Bonus

Using the command line can simplify and even automate many of the
operations we do on a computer. However, using the command line can
mean quite a bit of typing and a possibly large number of parameters. In
this post, I would like to focus on how to navigate the cursor and edit the
command line, while leaving all the other Bash tricks for the future posts.

I also have created simple graphics to illustrate some of the main shortcuts
listed below. This (hi-res) image can be printed for future reference.
Note: Please note that all commands containing ALT combinations might
not work depending on your system configuration, and most definitely not
work on MacOS. Normally, it is because these combinations are mapped
to something else. However, you can still use the same shortcuts simply by
replacing ALT with ESC .
 Navigating and Editing the Command Line (Bash Edition)

Moving Around the Command Line

So, let’s first speak about how to move the cursor around – because using
just arrow keys is often not the most optimal way of navigating. Sometimes
you might want to go to the beginning of the line, to the end of the line, or
simply jump from one word to another, where word – in this context – is set
of characters separated by spaces (or sometimes other special
characters), or as documentation states it:

A sequence of characters considered as a single unit by the

shell. Also known as a token.

# Moving the cursor – fast

CTRL+a Go to the beginning of the line (same as Home)
CTRL+e Go to the End of the line (same as End)
ALT+b / ESC+b Go one word back (to the left)
ALT+f / ESC+f Go one word forward (to the right)

# Moving the cursor – one character at a time

CTRL+f Go forward one character
CTRL+b Go backward one character

# Using history
 CTRL+r Backwards search in previously executed commands (history)
CTRL+p Previous command (same as Up arrow)
CTRL+n Next command (same as Down arrow)

Editing Commands in the Command Line

Now that we are able to navigate freely along the command line, it is time
to do some modifications. Here, we will see how to delete, cut, paste, and
swap words and characters.

# Deleting whole words

ALT+Del Delete the word before (to the left of) the cursor
ALT+d / ESC+d Delete the word after (to the right of) the cursor
CTRL+w Cut the word before the cursor to the clipboard

# Deleting parts of the line

CTRL+k Cut the line after the cursor to the clipboard
CTRL+u Cut/delete the line before the cursor to the clipboard

# Deleting single characters

CTRL+d Delete character under the cursor (same as Delete key)
CTRL+h Delete character before the cursor (same as Backspace key)

# Paste, Undo, revert, and more

CTRL+l Clear the screen (similar to the 'clear' command)
CTRL+y Paste the last thing to be cut (yank)
CTRL+_ Undo
ALT+r / ESC+r Revert the changes and replace with the line as it was
in History.

# Swap 'em!
CTRL+t Swap the last two characters before the cursor
ALT+t / ESC+t Swap current word with previous

# Convert to UPPER, lower, or Sentence case

 ALT+u / ESC+u Capitalise characters from the cursor to the end of
the current word and move to the end of the word.
ALT+l / ESC+l Lower the case of characters from the cursor to the
end of the current word and move to the end of the word.
ALT+c / ESC+c Capitalize the character under the cursor position
and move to the end of the word.

Bonus
First, the most obvious – you can always find more gems in the man pages
for Bash both in your terminal and online (for instance on this mirror). To
view it in your terminal, type:

$ man bash

Now, over to something different. Since we have been talking about the
command line and shells it is worth mentioning some less-known (and
sometimes “as a curiosity”) shortcuts in another terminal – Command
Prompt, cmd.exe :

Function keys in cmd.exe:

- F1: Pastes the last executed command (character by character)
- F2: Pastes the last executed command (up to the entered character)
- F3: Pastes the last executed command
- F4: Deletes current prompt text up to the entered character
- F5: Pastes recently executed commands (does not cycle)
- F6: Pastes ^Z to the prompt
- F7: Displays a selectable list of previously executed commands
- F8: Pastes recently executed commands (cycles)
- F9: Asks for the number of the command from the F7 list to paste

Good luck! Try them out and let me know how that goes!
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