Interactive Editing

Many people, especially beginners, use the arrow keys to move the cursor around the command line. Most people can do that in much less time than it would take them to remember the more powerful but more complicated alternatives that are provided. But some of these methods are worth learning, so we will present them here.

The shell comes with two different sets of key bindings (keyboard shortcuts), inspired by two extremely powerful text editors, Emacs and vi (probably the two most powerful ones that exist). By exploiting the keyboard shortcuts that these bindings offer, command line wizards are able to enter and edit even long command lines in just a fraction of a second. If you take the time to practice with the key bindings that the shell offers, even if they may seem impractical at first, you will very soon be able to do so too.

Note: You will only be able to take full advantage of the Emacs and vi bindings if you know how to type properly (using 10 fingers). If you don't, you should learn it as soon as possible. (There are a lot of free sites on the web that can teach you.) It is definitely worth it.There is an application called Klavaro you can use it to learn typing .

By default, the bash shell uses the Emacs bindings. If you want to try out the vi bindings, enter the following command:

$ set -o vi

You can switch back to the Emacs bindings by entering:

$ set -o emacs

The Emacs and vi bindings are very different, and both take some time to get used to. You should try out both bindings to find the ones that suits you best. This chapter covers the default, Emacs bindings. If you learn vi, you can switch to those bindings and you will find them pretty intuitive.

Hint: Do not try to learn all shortcuts at once! The human brain isn't made for that kind of stuff, so you will forget almost all of them. Rather, we advise you to learn the 4-5 shortcuts that you find most useful and use them regularly -- learning by doing. Later, you can come back to this chapter to pick up more shortcuts. You will soon find yourself whirling across the command line.

The Emacs bindings

The Emacs bindings make heavy use of Ctrl and Alt as modifier keys. Experienced Emacs users usually remap their CapsLock key as Ctrl in order to enter Emacs commands more comfortably (and to avoid repetitive strain injury!). Once you start using the Emacs bindings on a regular basis, we advise you to do the same.

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This space reserved for instruction on remapping the CapsLock key

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Moving around

The two most basic keystrokes for moving around on the command line in Emacs mode are Ctrl + f and Ctrl + b. They move the cursor one character to the right and to the left, respectively:

Ctrl + f	Move forward one character
Ctrl + b	Move backward one character

Of course, you can do the same cursor movements by using the arrow keys on your keyboard. But as was remarked above, using the Emacs bindings Ctrl + f and Ctrl + b may be more efficient, since your hands do not have to leave the letter block of your keyboard. At the moment, you may not notice the difference in speed (especially if you're not a fast typist yet), but once you get more experience in using the command line, you definitely won't want to touch the arrow keys again! (IMHO)

The following table lists some keystrokes which let you navigate the command line even faster:

Alt + f	Move forward one word
Alt + b	Move backward one word
Ctrl + a	Move to the beginning of the line
Ctrl + e	Move to the end of the line

Hint: The German word for "beginning" is Anfang. Would you ever forget such a strange word? Let's hope not, because it can help you remember that Ctrl + a takes you to the beginning of the command line.

By taking advantage of the keystrokes summarized in the table above, you can dramatically speed up your command line editing. If, for example, you have misspelled the first letter of a terribly long filename, the keystroke Alt + b brings the cursor back to the beginning of the word -- making cumbersome characterwise movement of the cursor unnecessary. The home and end keys, if present, provide an alternative to Ctrl + a and Ctrl + e.

Editing text

Two of the most commonly used editing commands are the following:

Ctrl + t	Transpose the character before the cursor and the character under/following the cursor
Alt + t	Transpose the word before the cursor and the word under/following the cursor

The two commands take a while to get used to, but both are very useful. While the main use of Ctrl + t is to correct typos, Alt + t is often used to "drag" a word forward on the command line. Have a look at the following command line (the underline marks the position of the cursor):

$ echo one two three four

If you press Alt + t in this situation, the word before the cursor ("one") is exchanged with the word after the cursor ("two"). Try it out! The result should look like this:

$ echo two one three four

You will notice two things. First, the order of the words "one" and "two" has been reversed. Second, the cursor has moved forward along with the word "one". Now, the cool thing about the cursor's moving along is that you just need to press Alt + t once more in order to transpose "one" with the following word, "three":

$ echo two three one four

So, by pressing Alt + t repeatedly, you can "drag" forward the word before the cursor until it has reached the end of the command line. (Of course, you can do the same with a single character by using Ctrl + t.)

At first, the elaborate functionality of the two transpose commands may seem a bit confusing. Just play around with them for a while, and you will soon get the hang of it.

Deleting/killing and reinserting text

Here are some handy commands for deleting/killing text:

Ctrl + d	Delete the character under the cursor
Alt + d	Kill all text from the cursor to the end of the current word
Alt + Backspace	Kill all text from the cursor to the beginning of the current word

Note that Alt + d and Alt + Backspace do not delete text, but kill it. Killing is different from deleting in that deleted text is gone, but killed text may be brought back to life (the term is "yanked") later on by using the following command:

Ctrl + y

Reinsert (yank) text that was previously killed

Let's see how this works by way of an example:

$ echo one two

Again, the cursor position is indicated by an underline. If you press Alt + Backspace in this situation, the word "two" as well as the whitespace after it will be killed, leaving the command line like this:

$ echo one

If you now press Ctrl + y, the killed text is "yanked" back into the command line. You can do this several times. If you press Ctrl + y three times, for example, you end up with the following line:

$ echo one two two two

As you can see, killing text is much like the "cut" function of most modern text editors. Note that text which is not killed, but deleted (by pressing Ctrl + d) cannot be reinserted into the command line. The only way to get it back is to use the undo function, which will be introduced below.

Probably the most useful commands for killing text are the following ones:

Ctrl + k	Kill all text from the cursor to the end of the line
Ctrl + u	Kill all text from the cursor to the beginning of the line (unix-discard-line)

As usual, the best way to learn these commands is to experiment with them. You will find that killing and, where necessary, reinserting big stretches of text can save you a lot of time.

Undoing changes

You can undo the last change that you made by using the following command:

Ctrl + _

Undo last change

An alternative way of doing the same thing is to press Ctrl + xu. (Press x and u in turn while holding down Ctrl.)

Navigating the shell's history

The shell saves the last commands that you enter in its history. This allows you to get back to previously entered commands, which can save you a lot of typing. Here are the most important commands for navigating the shell's command history:

Ctrl + p	Go to the previous command in the history
Ctrl + n	Go to the next command in the history
Ctrl + >	Go to the end of the history
Ctrl + r	Search the history for previously entered commands (reverse-search-history)
Ctrl + g	Cancel the current history search

Let's see how these commands work by way of a simple example. Open a shell and enter the following commands:

$ echo two
two
$ echo three
three
$ echo four
four

After you have entered these commands, you are left with an empty command line waiting for your input. Now, press Ctrl + p. You will notice that the previously entered command appears on your command line: echo four. If you press Ctrl + p once more, you move "up" in the history even further, so that echo three appears on the command line. Now, press Ctrl + n, and you will see that you have come back to echo four: Ctrl + n works exactly like Ctrl + p, but the other way round. The up and down arrow keys are alternatives to these.

After having pressed Ctrl + p and maybe also Ctrl + n a few times, you may want to get back to the command line that you were entering before you started navigating the history. You can do this by pressing Ctrl + >.

As you can see, the shell's history is nothing else but a big list of all recently entered commands. You can move up and down the list by pressing Ctrl + p and Ctrl + n, respectively. And you can press the Enter key at any time in order to execute the currently selected command line.

Since the shell's command history is just a big list, it is also searchable. This is most commonly done by using the command Ctrl + R. Again, let's assume that you have entered the commands echo two, echo three and echo four. Try pressing Ctrl + R now. You will notice that a new prompt appears which says something like "reverse-i-search". If you now enter the letter "t", you immediately jump back in history to the last command line containing "t", which is of course echo three. From there, you can use Ctrl + p and Ctrl + n to navigate the history as explained above. Or you can modify the search by entering a second letter, let's say "w". You then jump to the command echo two, because it is the nearest command in history containing the letter sequence "tw". Or you can just cancel the search by pressing Ctrl + g.

If you feel a bit lost in using the shell's history functions, don't worry! If you keep on practicing, you will quickly get into the routine of flipping back and forth in the shell's history, avoiding the cumbersome retyping of long command lines.

Interactive editing: an example

The following example is intended to show you how the interactive editing capabilities of the shell can drastically speed up your work. Let's suppose you have entered the following command line:

$ echoo ne two three
bash: echoo: command not found

Bash has thrown an error, because the command echoo doesn't exist. What you really meant, of course, was echo one two three. You will perhaps be surprised to hear that it takes just five keystrokes to correct the mistake:

Press Ctrl + p to get the previous history item back on screen, namely the wrongly entered command line.
Press Ctrl + a to move the cursor to the beginning of the line.
Press Alt + f to move the cursor forward by one word. The cursor is now located between the wrongly entered words "echoo" and "ne".
Press Ctrl + t. You will see that the "o" preceding the cursor and the whitespace under the cursor have been transposed: "echoo ne" has become "echo one".
Finally, press Enter to execute the corrected command line.