Cursor navigation in Terminal

Question

I quite often find myself needing to move the cursor to the beginning or the end of the line.

Is there a keyboard shortcut or other magic trick to move the cursor apart from the arrow keys.

Answer 1

^ + A for the beginning of the line

^ + E for the end of the line.

Works with Cocoa control too.

^ = Ctrl

Answer 2

You can also hold down the alt key and click with your mouse wherever you want the cursor to jump to.

Note however, that this only works on the same line the cursor currently is on, so if you have a long command wrapping around two lines, you will have to jump to the beginning of the second line, jump one character back (so you´re on the end of the first line now) and then can use the alt+mouse to navigate again.

Answer 3

Meta + B is equivalent to Ctrl + left arrow in Windows, while
Meta + F is equivalent to Ctrl + right arrow

by default the Meta key is the Escape, but that's configurable.

Answer 4

You can use vi-style line movement and modal editing on the command line by adding set -o vi to your ~/.bash_profile.