Have you ever hit alt + backspace while in a zsh session, intending to delete just the last part of a path, or a word, or an identifier, but ended up deleting far more than that? This is probably because you are using the default value for $WORDCHARS. The default value for $WORDCHARS is *?_-.[]~=/&;!#$%^(){}<> i.e. pretty much everything and the kitchen sink. Usually, therefore, you will want to remove characters which you don’t want to be considered parts of words
  • @[email protected]
    2•1 year ago

    I’ve been wanting to change this setting for SO LONG I just didn’t know what it was called. Very happy to accidentally run into this

  • @southernbrewer
    2•1 year ago

    You can delete a word in a terminal? Is this zsh specific or is there a bash equivalent?

    Terminal user for 20 years, never heard of this.

    • Snarwin
      3•1 year ago

      Alt+Backspace works in bash too, and should work in any other command-line program that reads input using readline.