How to move the cursor word by word in the OS X Terminal

Question

I know the combination Ctrl+A to jump to the beginning of the current command, and Ctrl+E to jump to the end.

But is there any way to jump word by word, like Alt+←/→ in Cocoa applications does?

Answer 1

Out of the box you can use the quite bizarre Esc+F to move to the beginning of the next word and Esc+B to move to the beginning of the current word.

Answer 2

On macOS (all versions) the following keyboard shortcuts work by default.

• ALT+F to jump Forward by a word.
• ALT+B to jump Backward by a word.

Note that you have to make set the Option key to act like the Meta key. You can do this in Terminal by accessing preferences (CMD+,) and selecting Profiles -> Keyboard. In iTerm2 select Profiles -> Keys -> General and select "Option key as Esc+."

Additionally some Emacs-style key bindings for simple text navigation seem to work on bash shells. You can use:

• CTRL+F to move forward by a char
• CTRL+B to move backward by a char
• CTRL+A to jump to start of the line
• CTRL+E to jump to end of the line
• CTRL+K to kill the line starting from the cursor position
• ALT+D to delete a word starting from the current cursor position
• CTRL+W to remove the word backwards from cursor position
• CTRL+Y to paste text from the kill buffer
• CTRL+R to reverse search for commands you typed in the past from your history.
• CTRL+S to forward search (works in ZSH for me but not bash)

Answer 3

Here's how you can do it

By default, the Terminal has these shortcuts to move (left and right) word-by-word:

• esc+B (left)
• esc+F (right)

You can configure alt+← and → to generate those sequences for you:

• Open Terminal preferences (cmd+,);
• At Settings tab, select Keyboard and double-click ⌥ ← if it's there, or add it if it's not.
• Set the modifier as desired, and type the shortcut key in the box: esc+B, generating the text \033b (you can't type this text manually).
• Repeat for word-right (esc+F becomes \033f)

Alternatively, you can refer to this blog post over at textmate:

http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/

Answer 4

Switch to iTerm2. It's free and much nicer than plain old terminal. Also it has a lot more options for customization, like keyboard shortcuts.

Also I love that you can use cmd and 1-9 to switch between tabs. Try it and you will never go back to regular terminal :)

How to set up custom keyboard preferences in iterm2

• Install iTerm2
• Launch and then go to preference pane.
• Choose the keyboard profiles tab
• You will either need to copy the profile to something new and then delete the arrow key shortcuts such as ^+ Right/Left or if you don't care about a backup just delete them from the default profile.
• Next make sure your modified profile is selected (starred)

• Now choose the keyboard tab (very top row)

• Click on the plus button to add a new keyboard shortcut
• In the first box type CMD+Left arrow
• In the second box choose "send escape code"
• In the third box type the letter B

• Repeat with desired key combinations. escape+B moves one word to the left, escape+f moves one word to the right.
• you may also wish to set up cmd+d to delete the word in front of the cursor with escape+d

I often hit the wrong button (cmd / control / alt) with an arrow key and so i have my arrow key combinations with those buttons all set to jump forward and back words, but please do what fits you best.

Answer 5

Actually there is a much better approach. Hold option ( alt on some keyboards) and press the arrow keys left or right to move by word. Simple as that.

option←
option→

Also ctrle will take you to the end of the line and ctrla will take you to the start.

Answer 6

I have Alt+←/→ working: open Preferences » Settings » Keyboard, set the entry for option cursor left to send string to shell: \033b, and set option cursor right to send string to shell: \033f. You can also use this for other Control key combinations.

Answer 7

Use Natural Text Editing preset!

Essentially it binds, among other key sequences, Option + LeftArrow to ^[b sequence and Option + RightArrow to ^[f

This works in fish and bash, as well as in psql terminal.

Answer 8

Actually it depends on what shell you use, however most shells have similar bindings. The bindings you are referring to (e.g. Ctrl+A and Ctrl+E) are bindings you will find in many other programs and they are used for ages, BTW also work in most UI apps.

Here's a look of default bindings for Bash:

Most Important Bash Keyboard Shortcuts

Please also note that you can customize them. You need to create a file, name as you wish, I named mine .bash_key_bindings and put it into my home directory. There you can set some general bash options and you can also set key bindings. To make sure they are applied, you need to modify a file named ".bashrc" that bash reads in upon start-up (you must create it, if it does not exist) and make the following call there:

bind -f ~/.bash_key_bindings

~ means home directory in bash, as stated above, you can name the file as you like and also place it where you like as long as you feed the right path+name to bind.

Let me show you some excerpts of my .bash_key_bindings file:

set meta-flag on
set input-meta on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set bell-style none
set print-completions-horizontally off

These just set a couple of options (e.g. disable the bell; this can be all looked up on the bash webpage).

"A": self-insert
"B": self-insert
"C": self-insert
"D": self-insert
"E": self-insert
"F": self-insert
"G": self-insert
"H": self-insert
"I": self-insert
"J": self-insert

These make sure that the characters alone just do nothing but making sure the character is "typed" (they insert themselves on the shell).

"\C-dW": kill-word
"\C-dL": kill-line
"\C-dw": backward-kill-word
"\C-dl": backward-kill-line
"\C-da": kill-line

This is quite interesting. If I hit Ctrl+D alone (I selected d for delete), nothing happens. But if I then type a lower case w, the word to the left of the cursor is deleted. If I type an upper case, however, the word to the right of the cursor is killed. Same goes for l and L regarding the whole line starting from the cursor. If I type an "a", the whole line is actually deleted (everything before and after the cursor).

I placed jumping one word forward on Ctrl+F and one word backward on Ctrl+B

"\C-f": forward-word
"\C-b": backward-word

As you can see, you can make a shortcut, that leads to an action immediately, or you can make one, that just inits a character sequence and then you have to type one (or more) characters to cause an action to take place as shown in the example further above.

So if you are not happy with the default bindings, feel free to customize them as you like. Here's a link to the bash manual for more information.

Answer 9

Hold down the Option key and click where you'd like the cursor to move

Answer 10

If you happen to be a Vim user, you could try bash's vim mode. Run this or put it in your ~/.bashrc file:

set -o vi

By default you're in insert mode; hit escape and you can move around just like you can in normal-mode Vim, so movement by word is w or b, and the usual movement keys also work.

Answer 11

If you check Use option as meta key in the keyboard tab of the preferences, then the default emacs style commands for forward- and backward-word and ⌥F (Alt+F) and ⌥B (Alt+B) respectively.

I'd recommend reading From Bash to Z-Shell. If you want to increase your bash/zsh prowess!

Answer 12

As of Mac OS X Lion 10.7, Terminal maps Option-Left/Right Arrow to Esc-b/f by default, so this is now built-in for bash and other programs that use these emacs-compatible keybindings.

Answer 13

Under iterm2's Preferences > Profile > Keys, you click the + below Key Mappings and record a new shortcut. For Action, select Send Escape Sequence and type b or f for backwards and forwards respectively.

When I tried to record one for (Ctrl+←), I noticed in the Keyboard Shortcut field that the arrow never showed up. Turns out I had to disable the default mac's System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Mission Control shorcuts first to get things to work, as they'll override iterm2's default shortcuts. Should be true for the standard terminal app, too.

Answer 14

In Bash, these are bound to Esc-B and Esc-F. Bash has many, many more keyboard shortcuts; have a look at the output of bind -p to see what they are.

Answer 15

For some reason, my terminal's option+arrow weren't working. To fix this on macOS 10.15.6, I opened the terminal app's preferences, and had to set the bindings.

Option-left = \033b
Option-right = \033e

For some reason, the option-right I had was set up to be \033f. Now that it's fixed, I can freely skip around words in the termianl again.

Answer 16

Here's the CLI way to do so, verified it works on bash.

Add the following to your ~/.inputrc:

# macOS Option + Left/Right arrow keys to move the cursor wordwise
"\e\e[C": forward-word
"\e\e[D": backward-word

The advantage of this method is that it is terminal application agnostic - doesn't matter whether you use Terminal.app, iTerm2, or any other application.

Inspiration got from this other answer.

Answer 17

As answered previously, you can add set -o vi in your ~/.bashrc to use vi/vim key bindings, or else you can add following part in .bashrc to move with Ctrl and arrow keys:

# bindings to move 1 word left/right with ctrl+left/right in terminal, just some apple stuff!
bind '"\e[5C": forward-word'
bind '"\e[5D": backward-word'
# bindings to move 1 word left/right with ctrl+left/right in iTerm2, just some apple stuff!
bind '"\e[1;5C": forward-word'
bind '"\e[1;5D": backward-word'

To start effect of these lines of code, either source ~/.bashrc or start a new terminal session.

Answer 18

New answer for iTerm2 Build 3.3.4 users:

Step 1: (macOS X) System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab > Select Mission Control (left panel) > Uncheck shortcuts that labeled as "Move left a space" and "Move right a space"

Step 2: (iTerm2 Build 3.3.4) Preferences > Profiles > Select * Default (left panel) > Keys tab > Delete both "⌥->" and "⌥<-" entries > Set both "Left Option (⌥) Key:" and "Right Option (⌥) Key:" to Esc+

No messing around with shell profiles, no messing around with inferior masOS (default) Terminal, no awkwards Esc+F/B, rinse & repeat non-sense.

Done deal!!!

Enjoy this tip, my fellow PROGRAMMERS!

Answer 19

in Cot Editor or in Terminal simple way to skip word without changing any settings is to use

Option_Key + -> (right arrow) to move one word to right

Option_key + <- (left arrow) to move one word to left

Answer 20

Just check the "Use Option as meta key" option in Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Keyboard, as mentioned here already by @cris-page.

Note however, that in macOS Catalina (10.15) and newer, zsh becomes the default shell for newly added users: its default configuration considers only whitespaces as word-boundaries, whereas the old bash makes meta-left/right jump to the nearest non-alphanumerical character (similar to B/W as opposed to b/w for those familiar with vim):

                  v----v- bash jumps here
$ vim some-folder/what.txt_<- jump left twice from here
  ^---^- zsh jumps here by default

(similar motions are true for meta-backspace as well)

There are more than one ways to make zsh command line editor navigation work similarly to bash's - here is one such method:

# Place in your profile init script, e.g. `~/.zshrc`
autoload -U select-word-style
select-word-style bash