is there a terminal emulator that has “modern” text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z…
Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character…
“modern” text entry controls… Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del …
Those are not really features of the terminal emulator but of the shell. I don’t think a terminal emulator can coerce bash or zsh or whatever to do those things unless it acts as some kind of proxy between your text editing buffer and the shell, which would probably lead to its own set of complications. The thing you want would have to be a combination of a GUI terminal program and its own shell.
For bash, I suggest you read up on readline keyboard shortcuts, which can do many of the text editing tricks that you are asking. The shortcuts are different than what you are used to on Windows, and there’s no concept of “selecting” text, but for terminal applications it’s pretty much the standard way text input is handled on Linux.
I’ve only managed to come close to that using vs code terminal and PowerShell.
PowerShell is the only shel I’ve found for windows that allows text selection with keyboard. And since no one uses PowerShell on Linux, no Linux terminals have good support for it, except the vscode terminal.
While y’all here:
is there a terminal emulator that has “modern” text entry controls while still having tab completion? Like selecting text by going shift+leftarrow or deleting whole words by holding ctrl+backspace/del or replacing whole words that are selected while pasting text rather than it pasting at the point where the curser is at the start of selected text so you still have to manually delete the original characters. Maybe Undo, redo with ctrl (shift) z…
Stuff like that. Just wondering. I always find it very cumbersome to fiddle with long commands especially if they contain long paths that you want to modify. Lots of backspace and arrow-keys hitting for every single character…
Those are not really features of the terminal emulator but of the shell. I don’t think a terminal emulator can coerce bash or zsh or whatever to do those things unless it acts as some kind of proxy between your text editing buffer and the shell, which would probably lead to its own set of complications. The thing you want would have to be a combination of a GUI terminal program and its own shell.
For bash, I suggest you read up on readline keyboard shortcuts, which can do many of the text editing tricks that you are asking. The shortcuts are different than what you are used to on Windows, and there’s no concept of “selecting” text, but for terminal applications it’s pretty much the standard way text input is handled on Linux.
I’d suggest checking out fish shell.
I know that
zshhas the option to use vim-like keybindings if you’re familiar with those.Bash (and other shells) have readline support which sounds similar to what you want?
I’ve only managed to come close to that using vs code terminal and PowerShell.
PowerShell is the only shel I’ve found for windows that allows text selection with keyboard. And since no one uses PowerShell on Linux, no Linux terminals have good support for it, except the vscode terminal.