Fastest way s to move the cursor on a terminal command line

Question

What is the best way to move around on a given very long command line in the terminal   Say I used the arrow key or Ctrl-R to get this long command line     cmd --option1 --option2 --option3 --option4 --option5 --option6 --option7 --option8 --option9 --option10 --option11 --option12 --option13 --option14 --option15 --option16 --option17 --option18 --option19 --option20 --option21 --option22 --option23 --option24 --option25 --option26 --option27 --option28 --option29 --option30 --option31 --option32 --option33 --option34 --option35 --option36 --option37 --option38 --option39 --option40 --option41 --option42 --option43 --option44 --option45 --option46 --option47 --option48 --option49 --option50    Now I need to move  starting from the beginning or the end of the line  the cursor to --option25 to modify something there    What is the fastest way to get there  What I usually do is Ctrl-A to get to the beginning and then repeatedly Alt-F to move forward  word by word  or Ctrl-E to go the end and Alt-B to then go backward   But on a long line that takes too much time  There must be a way to search and jump directly to the part I need to modify  e g  option25

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After running the command once  run fc  It will launch  EDITOR with the previous command  then you can use your regular editor to modify the command  When you save and exit  the file will be executed     but  as Pax said - the command line isn t particularly good for editing absurdly long lines - why not make the command into a script

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Hold down the Option key and click where you d like the cursor to move  and Terminal rushes the cursor that precise spot

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It might not be the fastest  but this need to be here  some reading about ANSI cursor movements  ANSI escape sequences allow you to move the cursor around the screen at will  This is more useful for full screen user interfaces generated by shell scripts  but can also be used in prompts  The movement escape sequences are as follows   - Position the Cursor     033  lt L gt   lt C gt H      Or    033  lt L gt   lt C gt f   puts the cursor at line L and column C  - Move the cursor up N lines     033  lt N gt A - Move the cursor down N lines     033  lt N gt B - Move the cursor forward N columns     033  lt N gt C - Move the cursor backward N columns     033  lt N gt D  - Clear the screen  move to  0 0      033 2J  or  033c - Erase to end of line     033 K  - Save cursor position     033 s - Restore cursor position     033 u          Try putting in the following line of code at the prompt  it s a little clearer what it does if the prompt is several lines down the terminal when you put this in   echo -en   033 7A 033 1 35m BASH  033 7B 033 6D  This should move the cursor seven lines up screen  print the word   BASH    and then return to where it started to produce a normal prompt      Examples   Move the cursor back 7 lines   echo -e   033 7A    Move the cursor to line 10  column 5   echo -e   033 10 5H    Quickly echo colors codes  to colorize a program   echo -e   033 35 42m    ifconfig

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Since this hasn t been closed yet  here are a few more options    Use Ctrl x followed by Ctrl e to open the current line in the editor specified by  FCEDIT or  EDITOR or emacs  tried in that order   If you ran the command earlier  hit Ctrl r for a reverse history search and type option25  in this case   The line will be displayed  Hit Tab to start editing at this point  Use history expansion with the s    modifier  E g   -2 s --option25 --newoption  would rerun the second-to-last command  but replace option25  To modify the last   cmd command  use the  string syntax     cmd s --option25 --newoption  Any delimiter may be used in place of   in the substitution  If editing the previous line  you can use quick substitution   --option25 --newoption Character search  This was mentioned by Pax  and can be done in regular emacs-mode with Ctrl   for forward search  and Ctrl Alt   for backward search    I recommend the second option  Ctrl r is really handy and fast  no mucking about with editors  and you see the results before the command is run  unlike the history expansions

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I made a script to make the command line cursor move on mouse click     Enable xterm mouse tracking reporting Set readline bindings to consume the escape sequence generated by clicks   It can be found on github  More info on another post  Will work if echo -e   e  1000 1006 1015h    Enable tracking print escape sequences on terminal when clicking with mouse

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Use Meta-b   Meta-f to move backward forward by a word respectively   In OSX  Meta translates as ESC  which sucks   But alternatively  you can open terminal preferences -  settings -  profile -  keyboard and check  use option as meta key

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In Cygwin  you can activate such feature by right-clicking the window  In the pop-up window  select Options    -  Mouse -  activate Clicks place command line cursor -  Apply   From now on  simply clicking the left mouse button at some position within the command line will place the cursor there

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If you want to move forward a certain number of words  hit M- lt n gt   M- is for Meta and its usually the escape key  then hit a number  This sends a repeat argument to readline  so you can repeat whatever command you want - if you want to go forward then hit M- lt n gt  M-f and the cursor will move forward  lt n gt  number of words   E g       echo  two three four five six seven     M-4   arg  4  echo  two three four five six seven     M-f    echo  two three four  five six seven    So for your example from the cursor at the beginning of the line you would hit  M-26 M-f and your cursor would be at --option25  -or- from the end of the line M-26 M-b would put your cursor at -- option25

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first  export EDITOR  nano -m   then  CTRL X   CTRL E in sequence   You current line will open in nano editor with mouse enable  You can click in any part of text and edit  then CTRL X  to exit and y to confirm saving

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Incremental history searching  in terminal enter   gedit     inputrc   then copy paste and save    e A   history-search-backward   e B   history-search-forward   e C   forward-char   e D   backward-char   all you need to do to find a previous command is to enter say the first 2 or 3 letters and upward arrow will take you there quickly say i want   for f in   mid   do timidity   f   done   all i need to do is enter   fo   and hit upward arrow command will soon appear

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I tend to prefer vi editing mode  since those keystrokes are embedded into my spinal cord now  the brain s not used at all   along with the CTRL-K  CTRL-X from WordStar 3 3  -   You can use the command line set -o vi to activate it  and set -o emacs to revert    In Vi  it would be  ESC-K to get the line up first of course   f5  B   without the double quotes    Of course  you have to understand what s on the line to get away with this  Basically  it s  f5 to find the first occurrence of  5   in --option5      to find the next one  in --option15      to find the next one  in --option25   B  to back up to the start of the word    Let s see if the emacs aficionados can come up with a better solution  less than 5 keystrokes  although I don t want to start a religious war    Have you thought about whether you d maybe like to put this horrendously long command into a script   -   Actually  I can go one better than that   3f5B  to find the third occurrence of  5  then back up to the start of the word

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To be clear  you don t want a  fast way to move the cursor on a terminal command line   What you actually want is a fast way to navigate over command line in you shell program   Bash is very common shell  for example  It uses Readline library to implement command line input  And so to say  it is very convenient to know Readline bindings since it is used not only in bash  For example  gdb also uses Readline to process input   In Readline documentation you can find all navigation related bindings  and more   http   www gnu org software bash manual bash html Readline-Interaction  Short copy-paste if the link above goes down   Bare Essentials   Ctrl-b Move back one character  Ctrl-f Move forward one character   DEL  or  Backspace  Delete the character to the left of the cursor  Ctrl-d Delete the character underneath the cursor  Ctrl-  or C-x C-u Undo the last editing command  You can undo all the way back to an empty line    Movement   Ctrl-a Move to the start of the line  Ctrl-e Move to the end of the line  Meta-f Move forward a word  where a word is composed of letters and digits  Meta-b Move backward a word  Ctrl-l Clear the screen  reprinting the current line at the top    Kill and yank   Ctrl-k Kill the text from the current cursor position to the end of the line   M-d Kill from the cursor to the end of the current word  or  if between words  to the end of the next word  Word boundaries are the same as those used by M-f   M- DEL  Kill from the cursor the start of the current word  or  if between words  to the start of the previous word  Word boundaries are the same as those used by M-b   Ctrl-w Kill from the cursor to the previous whitespace  This is different than M- because the word boundaries differ  Ctrl-y Yank the most recently killed text back into the buffer at the cursor   M-y Rotate the kill-ring  and yank the new top  You can only do this if the prior command is C-y or M-y    M is Meta key  For Max OS X Terminal you can enable  Use option as meta key  in Settings Keyboard for that  For Linux its more complicated   Update  Also note  that Readline can operate in two modes    emacs mode  which is the default  vi mode   To switch Bash to use vi mode     set -o vi   Personaly I prefer vi mode since I use vim for text editing   Bonus  In macOS Terminal app  and in iTerm too  you can Option-Click to move the cursor  cursor will move to clicked position   This even works inside vim

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One option is to use M-x shell in emacs  That provides all editing facilities and keystrokes that emacs has  so C-s can be used to search the text option25  for example     But I d still prefer to be in the real terminal shell instead if someone can point me to good search and edit facilities

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Use the mouse  Sometimes  the easiest way to edit a commandline is using a mouse  Some previous answers give a command to open your current line in your  EDITOR  For me  zhs with grml config  that combination is Alt e  If you enable mouse in your editor  you can make use of it   To enable mouse in Vim  add this to your    vimrc  set mouse a set ttymouse xterm2   If you then want to do a text selection in terminal  instead of passing the mouseclick to vim   hold Shift when you click  this is terminal specific  of course   Sysadmins should not be afraid of the mouse

[bash] Fastest way(s) to move the cursor on a terminal command line?

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