iTerm2 and keyboard navigation - Today I Learned

 I've been using iTerm2 off and on for a few years now, and find it especially useful when running live demos - one nice feature is that I can present multiple terminal windows in the same screen - windowed windows on a Mac 🤣

Right now, I'm using version 3.4.15 of iTerm, but that's not necessarily important right now.

The thing that was making me go "Hmmmm" was the "feature" that meant that I struggled to jump back along a line of commands using the [option] [arrow] keys ...

My muscle memory is that I can use that key combination to jump back and forth within a long list of commands on a single line to, for example, allow me to edit the command, add a switch etc.

By default, in iTerm, hitting [option] and [left-arrow] would, instead of jumping one word to the left ( as in the default macOS Terminal.app ) would instead append [D - which is a pain

So, here's an example: -

echo `date` && echo "Hello World" && echo "Dave"

I want to jump back to the second echo command, and change the greeting to "Hello World!".

Obviously, that's a very very trivial example, but the point remains the same ...

As ever, the internet helped - my Google Fu found this: -

Using Alt/Cmd + Right/Left Arrow in iTerm

which had a bunch of suggested solutions, the most simple of which was to simply append: -

bindkey "\e\e[D" backward-word
bindkey "\e\e[C" forward-word

to ~/.zshrc

Once I did this and restarted my shell ( I'm using Zsh obviously ), I was off to the races ....

For the record, I could've simply sourced in the updated ~/.zshrc via source ~/.zshrc