Tag Archives: word by word jump

[MacOS] Switcher’s Hints 1001: Moving Cursor in Terminal

Mac OS has the wonderful feature that it’s got a BSD compatible Unix enviroment called Darwin as the basis. You can get to it by simply starting the terminal. Once getting used to it you even install Cygwin to your Microsoft Windows installation because it simply is a powerful way of controlling your computer.

Anyway typos and forgotten parameters is pita once you entered some longer commands. Going back to the beginning of the line is real pain, using the right/left cursor arrows takes forever. But there are workarounds…

The following list shows some of the most common commands that help to use the terminal more effectively – derived from the old unix days btw.

Key
Function
Ctrl-A jump to beginning of the line
Ctrl-E jump to end of the line
Esc-F jump forward word by word (requires to hit Esc every time again!)
Esc-B jump backword word by word (requires to hit Esc every time again!)
Tab completes the names of folders and files

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