David @ Tokyo

I half discovered this while taping away on my Solaris machine at work yesterday: Command Line Editing.

Mistyping a really long command can be a pain in the butt especially if you make a mistake along the way. Until now I have always been copying the correct part of the string, pasting, adding correct characters, and copying and pasting the remaining correct part of the string. This works, but involves reaching for the mouse. No more! I finally found out how to "edit the command line".

By default, bash uses commands to edit, like f to go forward a character, b to go back a character, a and e to go the start and end of the command respectively. I use the vi(m) editor, so I didn't realise that these commands were actually emacs style cursor movement commands. But no problem, I can apparently set bash to use vi style editing instead:

$ set -o vi

Excellent!
Another command which I will have to explore is

$ bind -v

...
set editing-mode vi
...

This command seems to dump information about a whole load of other goodies, which I will have to check out. The only one I understand so far is the one above, indicating that I have set my command line editing mode to vi style...

posted by David  # 8:22 pm