Keyboard Shortcuts for Jumping and Deleting in iTerm2

This content originally appeared on Marius Schulz and was authored by Marius Schulz

As a software engineer, I find myself using the terminal every day to run all sorts of commands. My current terminal of choice is iTerm2 which I’ve been using happily for many years.

Whenever I set up iTerm2 on a new Mac, one of the first things I do is to configure familiar keyboard shortcuts for common navigation and edit actions in the command prompt. For example, I typically configure the ⌥← shortcut which jumps me to the start of the word under the cursor.

To configure custom keyboard shortcuts in iTerm2, open the preferences dialog and navigate to the Profiles › Keys › Key Mappings tab:

Click the “+” button to add a new key mapping, or double-click an existing key mapping to edit it. For the “Jump to start of word” command, select the “Send Escape Sequence” action and send the escape sequence Esc+b:

Now, whenever you're typing a command in iTerm2, it's really easy to jump back to the start of the word (or even multiple words) to insert more text or delete part of the command — no more need for repeatedly pressing the ← key to navigate back character by character.

Here's the full list of keyboard shortcuts that I configure for various jump and delete commands:

This content originally appeared on Marius Schulz and was authored by Marius Schulz

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Marius Schulz | Sciencx (2022-06-05T00:00:00+00:00) Keyboard Shortcuts for Jumping and Deleting in iTerm2. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/06/05/keyboard-shortcuts-for-jumping-and-deleting-in-iterm2/

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