Sounds like you would benefit from investing a short amount of time in learning some defaultreadline keyboard shortcuts. Note that user606723's answer above gives some basic ones but theHome and Alt+arrow keys do not work on all terminals. Here are a few of the ones I find the following most useful and which also work in more terminals.
(Unless otherwise noted, "word" means an alphanumeric string.)
- Alt-f: go one word forward.
- Alt-b: go one word back.
- Ctrl-a: go to beginning of line
- Ctrl-e: go to end of line
- Alt-d: delete to end of word
- Alt-Backspace: delete to beginning of word
- Ctrl-w: delete backwards to whitespace
- Ctrl-y: paste most recently deleted text
- Ctrl-b, Ctrl-f: move backward/forward one character, equivalent to left and right
- Ctrl-h, Ctrl-d: equivalent to Backspace and Delete, respectively.
I list the last few because I find them more convenient than reaching for the arrow keys or delete/backspace. You can see how with these basic shortcuts you can do quite a bit of editing rather easily. But there are more:
- Alt-.: rotate through the last word (white-space delimited) of the previous lines in history. Using it one gets you the last argument of the most recent command you typed.
- Ctrl-_: undo (incremental)
- Ctrl-]: search forward for character (like
fin vim, but less convenient) - Ctrl-r: reverse history search
- Alt-0...Alt-9: numeric argument to next command. For example if you wanted to delete 4 words: Alt-4Alt-d. Or if you need 1024
A's on the command line for some reason:Alt-1024A. - Ctrl-u: delete from cursor position to beginning of line
- Ctrl-k: delete from cursor position to end of line
And these are just a few of the ones I use - there are many more in the manpage.