Terminal tips for OSX
I’ve been meaning to get around to it for the longest time, but I finally switched over my Mac’s to use bash as the default shell (previously I had it set to tcsh). I’ve become more accustomed to bash the past few years as its the default shell on pretty much any unix/linux nowadays, so it was time to migrate.
The migration itself was pretty easy, but I wanted to gain some of bash’s features, specifically the emac-like keystrokes for moving forward/back a word in the command line, and also to the beginning and end of the line. The keystrokes, among others, are:
ctrl-a Move cursor to beginning of line
ctrl-e Move cursor to end of line
meta-b Move cursor back one word
meta-f Move cursor forward one word
ctrl-w Cut the last word
ctrl-u Cut everything before the cursor
ctrl-k Cut everything after the cursor
ctrl-y Paste the last thing to be cut
ctrl-_ Undo
I’m a big fan of iTerm – I use it as my primary terminal and have been for the last few years, as it matured in terms of performance and has a lot of great features. The most compelling feature it has over the built in OSX Terminal.app, for me, is that you can specify which characters to include when selecting words. A common operation in a terminal is to select a path, i.e. /home/myuser/testfile. In Terminal.app, if you double click on home, it will just select home – so you have to go back, double click on the first “/” character, and mouse right to get the whole word. With iTerm, you can set a preference with characters to include when connecting, i.e. “/”, so when I double click on home in iTerm, it selects the full path. Specifically, in iTerm -> Preferences -> Mouse, i have “Characters considered part of word:” set to /-_.
One thing I couldn’t figure out was how to get the “meta” key in iterm set to the alt/option key on the mac keyboard. Turns out it’s buried in a non-intuitive place, but it can be done. In iTerm, go to Bookmarks->Manage Profiles, and under Keyboard Profiles select Global. On the right side, you need to set Option Key as “+Esc” for this to work – yes, its strange that it has to be Esc instead of Meta, but hey, at least it all works.
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