When I was first starting out in software engineering, it felt like there was a never-ending barrage of tooling to learn. After more than a decade in CLI environments, I still find myself constantly learning new features and fun facts - but it’s fairly rare that I learn something new that I end up using day-to-day. I wanted to share some things I learned at relatively late stages in the game that ended up being significant productivity boosters for me - perhaps some of them are well-known, but in the spirit of this XCKD, I hope that someone reading this might pick up something new.
  • Ferk
    1·
    4 months ago
    • Alt-delete deletes the whole word before cursor
    • Alt-d deletes the whole word after cursor
    • Ctrl-k deletes (kill) everything after the cursor

    Whatever is deleted is stored in the “killring” and can be pasted(yanked) back with Ctrl-y (like someone else already mentioned), consecutive uses of Alt-delete/Alt-d add to the killring.

    • Alt-b / Alt-f moves one word backwards / forwards
    • Alt-t swaps (translocates) the current word with the previous one
    • Ctrl-_ undo last edit operation

    All those bindings are the same as in emacs.

    Also, normally Ctrl-d inserts the end-of-file character, and typically can be used to close an active shell session or when you have some other interpreter open in the terminal for interactive input.