Navigate Bash with ease

This is an introduction to keyboard shortcuts in Bash and Readline. To see the list of shortcuts, skip to the summary.

Introduction

We all make mistakes when running commands in a terminal. Fixing these mistakes can be tedious. Do you ever find yourself pressing the arrow keys repeatedly to move the cursor?

$ ls secrets/
ls: cannot open directory 'secrets/': Permission denied

# <Up> <Left> <Left> <Left> <Left> <Left> <Left> <Left> […]

$ sudo ls secrets/

Ouch. That’s a lot of key presses.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. Bash uses the Readline library, which provides a number of keyboard shortcuts to move the cursor and edit text.

Back to the beginning

Press Ctrl + A to move the cursor to the beginning of the line.

$ ls secrets/
ls: cannot open directory 'secrets/': Permission denied

# <Up> <Ctrl+A> sudo

$ sudo ls secrets/

Press Ctrl + E to return to the end of the line.

Moving between words

Press Alt + B to move the cursor backwards by one word.

Press Alt + F to move forwards by one word.

$ git commit 'Update README.md'
error: pathspec 'Update README.md' did not match any file(s) known to git

# <Up> <Ctrl+A> <Alt+F> <Alt+F> -m

$ git commit -m 'Update README.md'

These shortcuts might not work if the Alt key has been reserved for other uses, such as typing accented characters. However, there is another way: press and release the Esc key, then press B or F. This works for all Readline shortcuts that use the Alt key.

Deleting words

Press Ctrl + W to delete the previous word (to the left of the cursor).

$ git add start.sh stop.sh
fatal: pathspec 'stop.sh' did not match any files

# <Up> <Ctrl+W>

$ git add start.sh

Press Alt + D to delete the next word (to the right of the cursor).

Undo

Yes, you can even undo. Press Ctrl + _ (that’s the hyphen/underscore key).

For example, if you deleted a word with Ctrl + W, press Ctrl + _ to bring it back.

The undo history only applies to the current line.

Summary

And that’s it. Here’s a cheat sheet:

These shortcuts are provided by the Readline library, which is used by other command-line tools in addition to Bash. For example, you can also use these shortcuts in irb (the interactive Ruby shell).

References

• Bash Reference Manual: Bindable Readline Commands