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When I open a terminal and type

asdf asdf asdf asdf

And hit control-u, the line gets wiped. If I type that line again, but then use option-left to skip a word back, then control-u doesn't wipe the line at all.

To begin with I was having trouble with option-right not skipping words forward. So I thought I fixed it with these terminal settings. But honestly I have no idea what these ascii codes do, and what state my terminal gets into.

Do ascii codes that skip words forward and back without breaking the terminal exist? What are they?

mac terminal keyboard settings

FYI Looking at set -o I see that VI mode is off.

macbookpro% set -o | grep ' on'
combiningchars        on
interactive           on
login                 on
shinstdin             on
ubershmekel
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    It’s actually Emacs behavior, not vi What you have to do is change the key bindings. See if this gets you in the right direction. https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/85757/119271 – Allan Sep 03 '20 at 04:20
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    It's actually a readline binding within bash, so you can change the behaviour in .inputrc. Or just start to get used to C-y to get the line back if you delete it by accident :-) – nohillside Sep 03 '20 at 06:49
  • I tried this again in bash and I could use ctrl-u and option-arrow freely, so the profile config is working fine. I suspect it might be a binding problem in zsh. EDIT - I needed to set the option-right back to \033f for it to work well in bash. – ubershmekel Sep 03 '20 at 15:34
  • It seems that bindkey -r "^[" vi-cmd-mode completely disables the skipping words functionality – ubershmekel Sep 03 '20 at 15:52

1 Answers1

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I found a lot of clues here: https://coderwall.com/p/a8uxma/zsh-iterm2-osx-shortcuts

This is what I put in my .zshrc to fix things.

bindkey "\033f" forward-word
bindkey "\033b" backward-word
bindkey "\033[H" beginning-of-line
bindkey "\033[F" end-of-line

Alongside these terminal keyboard settings:

MacOS default terminal keyboard settings

For some reason, the control (^) key modifier can be set, but does not activate the codes in the terminal. So I'm only using option and shift.

I found a similar solution here which mentioned you can see the key codes by running cat. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12382499/looking-for-altleftarrowkey-solution-in-zsh

Initially I used whatever key codes I wanted. That was a mistake, because even though they worked on my local mac, they didn't work when I SSH-ed into a linux machine. Using less /etc/inputrc on the remote bash I found these existing shortcuts:

# allow the use of the Home/End keys
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line

mappings for Ctrl-left-arrow and Ctrl-right-arrow for word moving


"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word
"\e\e[C": forward-word
"\e\e[D": backward-word

Also, my local bash had different settings. To find those out I used

bash-3.2$ bind -p | grep of-line
"\C-a": beginning-of-line
"\eOH": beginning-of-line
"\e[H": beginning-of-line
"\C-e": end-of-line
"\eOF": end-of-line
"\e[F": end-of-line

Which made me settle on the terminal keyboard settings you see at the top. Because they worked in all 3 settings (local zsh, local bash, remote bash).

ubershmekel
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