Readline shortcuts

shortcuts.md

Readline Keyboard Shortcuts

Copied from the readline documentation.

For MacOS, replace Ctrl with Cmd, and Meta with Option.

Shortcut	Comment
Ctrl+A	Beginning of line
Ctrl+B / ←	Backward one character
Meta+B	Backward one word
Ctrl+C	Send io.EOF
Ctrl+D	Delete one character
Meta+D	Delete one word
Ctrl+E	End of line
Ctrl+F / →	Forward one character
Meta+F	Forward one word
Ctrl+G	Cancel1
Ctrl+H	Delete previous character
Ctrl+I / Tab	Command line completion
Ctrl+J	Line feed
Ctrl+K	Kill2 text to the end of line
Ctrl+Y	Yank3 text back onto command line
Ctrl+L	Clear screen
Ctrl+M	Same as Enter key
Ctrl+N / ↓	Next line (in history)
Ctrl+P / ↑	Prev line (in history)
Ctrl+R	Search backwards in history
Ctrl+S	Search forwards in history
Ctrl+T	Transpose characters
Meta+T	Transpose words
Ctrl+U	Kill text to the beginning of line
Ctrl+W	Kill previous word
Backspace	Delete previous character
Meta+Backspace	Kill previous word
Enter	Line feed
Ctrl+_	Undo edits

Footnotes

1. Same as Escape ↩

2. Killing text means to delete the text from the line, but to save it away for later use, usually by yanking (re-inserting) it back into the line. (‘Cut’ and ‘paste’ are more recent jargon for ‘kill’ and ‘yank’.) ↩

3. Yanking means to copy the most-recently-killed text from the kill buffer ↩