iTerm 2: How to set keyboard shortcuts to jump to beginning/end of line?

Question

I can see that Ctrl+left/right jumps to the beginning/end of line. How to change this to Cmd+left/right arrow

Answer 1

I see there's a lot of good answers already, but this should provide the closest to native OSX functionality as possible in more than just your shell. I verified that this works in ZSH, Bash, node, python -i, iex and irb/pry sessions (using rb-readline gem for readline, but should work for all).

Open the iTerm preferences ⌘+, and navigate to the Profiles tab (the Keys tab can be used, but adding keybinding to your profile allows you to save your profile and sync it to multiple computers) and keys sub-tab and enter the following:

Delete all characters left of the cursor

⌘+←Delete Send Hex Codes:

0x15 More compatible, but functionality sometimes is to delete the entire line rather than just the characters to the left of the curser. I personally use this and then overwrite my zsh bindkey for ^U to delete only stuff to the left of the cursor (see below).

or

0x18 0x7f Less compatible, doesn't work in node and won't work in zsh by default, see below to fix zsh (bash/irb/pry should be fine), performs desired functionality when it does work.

Delete all characters right of the cursor

⌘+fn+←Delete or ⌘+Delete→ Send Hex Codes: 0x0b

Delete one word to left of cursor

⌥+←Delete Send Hex Codes:

0x1b 0x08 Breaks in Elixir's IEX, seems to work fine everywhere else

or

0x17 Works everywhere, but doesn't stop at normal word breaks in IRB and will instead delete until it sees a literal space.

Delete one word to right of cursor

⌥+fn←Delete or ⌥+Delete→ Send Hex Codes: 0x1b 0x64

Move cursor to the front of line

⌘+← Send Hex Codes: 0x01

Move cursor to the end of line

⌘+→ Send Hex Codes: 0x05

Move cursor one word left

⌥+← Send Hex Codes: 0x1b 0x62

Move cursor one word right

⌥+→ Send Hex Codes: 0x1b 0x66

Undo

⌘+z Send Hex Codes: 0x1f

Redo typically not bound in bash, zsh or readline, so we can set it to a unused hexcode which we can then fix in zsh

⇧+⌘+Z or ⌘+y Send Hex Codes: 0x18 0x1f

Now how to fix any that don't work

For zsh, you can setup binding for the not yet functional ⌘+←Delete and ⇧+⌘+Z/⌘+y by running:

# changes hex 0x15 to delete everything to the left of the cursor,
# rather than the whole line
$ echo 'bindkey "^U" backward-kill-line' >> ~/.zshrc

# binds hex 0x18 0x7f with deleting everything to the left of the cursor
$ echo 'bindkey "^X\\x7f" backward-kill-line' >> ~/.zshrc

# adds redo
$ echo 'bindkey "^X^_" redo' >> ~/.zshrc

# reload your .zshrc for changes to take effect
$ source ~/.zshrc

I'm unable to find a solution for adding redo in bash or readline, so if anyone know a solution for either of those, please comment below and I'll try to add them in.

For anyone looking for the lookup table on how to convert key sequences to hex, I find this table very helpful.

Answer 2

explained in https://aaronaddleman.com/articles/hexcodes-and-iterm/

you can use xxd -psd to get key hex code.

Answer 3

For me, the following combination worked:
| Key Action Esc+ End result | |-----------------------------------------------------| | ⌘← Send Escape Sequence a Send ^[ a | | ⌘→ Send Escape Sequence e Send ^[ e |

Answer 4

The only things that work for for moving to the beginning and end of line are

⌘← "SEND ESC SEQ" OH - to move to the beginning of line
⌘→ "SEND ESC SEQ" OF - to move to the end of line

Answer 5

As Explains in here, you can do it with a simple steps:

By default, word jumps (option + → or ←) and word deletions (option + backspace) do not work. To enable these, go to "iTerm → Preferences → Profiles → Keys → Load Preset... → Natural Text Editing → Boom! Head explodes"

Answer 6

Add in iTerm2 the following Profile Shortcut Keys

FOR  ACTION         SEND
⌘←  "SEND HEX CODE"      0x01 
⌘→  "SEND HEX CODE"      0x05
⌥←  "SEND ESC SEQ"  b
⌥→  "SEND ESC SEQ"  f

Here is a visual for those who need it