When I was first starting out in software engineering, it felt like there was a never-ending barrage of tooling to learn. After more than a decade in CLI environments, I still find myself constantly learning new features and fun facts - but it’s fairly rare that I learn something new that I end up using day-to-day. I wanted to share some things I learned at relatively late stages in the game that ended up being significant productivity boosters for me - perhaps some of them are well-known, but in the spirit of this XCKD, I hope that someone reading this might pick up something new.
  • @[email protected]
    15•4 months ago

    Ctl-U to delete everything on the line before cursor.

    Ctl-E to skip to end of line.

    Ctl-A to skip to beginning of line.

    • astrsk
      12•4 months ago

      Or, just use Home and End like they were intended! Kids these days….

      • NostraDavid
        5•4 months ago

        Kids these days….

        These Ctrl keys are shortcuts from Emacs - there’s a Bash settings to switch to vi-mode if you so wish. Anyway, the first Emacs was written in 1981, probably on a PDP-11, which did not have Home and End! Same reason Neovim uses “yank” instead of “copy”. ctrl-c/ctrl-v did not exist as a shortcut back when vi was being written!

        I know you didn’t intend to be mean or anything, but maaaaaan kids these days don’t know their history (not entirely your fault, btw)😆

      • ShaunaTheDead
        2•4 months ago

        This tip is super useful to me because not everyone is using a PC. On a PC sure, I would use the Home and End keys all the time. Now I’m using a laptop as my main computer and the Home and End keys are in a weird position that even to this day, 4ish years of laptop use, I still have to actually look at the keys to find them.

      • @[email protected]
        0•4 months ago

        That’s horrible for muscle memory, every time I switch desk/keyboard I have to re-learn the position of the home/end/delete/PgUp/PgDn keys.

        I got used to Ctrl-a / Ctrl-e and it became second nature, my hands don’t have to fish for extra keys, to the point that it becomes annoying when a program does not support that. Some map Ctrl-a to “Select all” so, for input fields where the selection is one line, I’d rather Ctrl-a then left/right to go to the beginning/end than fish for home/end, wherever they are.

    • @[email protected]
      2•4 months ago

      ctrl-b: move cursor back one character

      ctrl-f: move cursor foward one character

      ctrl-d: delete character under cursor

      • @lmaydev
        1•4 months ago

        But that’s more key presses than just using existing keys

        • @[email protected]
          1•4 months ago

          I find it easier using my pinky to hit ctrl than taking my fingers off the home row to use the arrow keys.

    • @[email protected]
      1•4 months ago
      • Alt-delete deletes the whole word before cursor
      • Alt-d deletes the whole word after cursor
      • Ctrl-k deletes (kill) everything after the cursor

      Whatever is deleted is stored in the “killring” and can be pasted(yanked) back with Ctrl-y (like someone else already mentioned), consecutive uses of Alt-delete/Alt-d add to the killring.

      • Alt-b / Alt-f moves one word backwards / forwards
      • Alt-t swaps (translocates) the current word with the previous one
      • Ctrl-_ undo last edit operation

      All those bindings are the same as in emacs.

      Also, normally Ctrl-d inserts the end-of-file character, and typically can be used to close an active shell session or when you have some other interpreter open in the terminal for interactive input.