How to customise .inputrc to make command-delete and alt delete delete line and word in terminal?

Question

I'd like to add a little bit of consistency between editing text on the terminal and editing text in normal OSX programs. I use iTerm2, but I imagine any solution would involve using readline and .inputrc which probably would work in most terminals.

Specifically, I was thinking of adding:

• Cmd + Delete: Delete to start of line before cursor
• Alt + Delete: Delete word before cursor
• Alt + Left/Right: move cursor between words
• Cmd+Left/Right: move cursor to start/end of line

Questions

• How could .inputrc be configured to support these keyboard shortcuts?
• Would any of these shortcuts generate conflicts with existing terminal or command-line shortcuts?
• Are there any other shortcuts that would be useful to create consistency with standard OSX text editing keys?

As a side note, I am aware that there are Vi and Emacs style shortcuts for performing these operations. In fact I use Vi-style shortcuts quite a lot on the command-line. However, sometimes when my mind hasn't shifted modes, its disruptive. Thus, it would be nice if the terminal could support both OSX and Vim style shortcuts.

Answer 1

⌘← can be assigned to \eOH and ⌘→ to \eOF. You could assign ⌥← to \eb like in Terminal, but it doesn't work in vi mode or nano.

In emacs mode you could also add this to .inputrc:

"\e[1;9D": backward-word
"\e[1;9C": forward-word
"\e[3~": kill-word

C-v shows the escape sequence for the next key combination. ^[ is ESC in caret notation. bind -p prints currently bound commands.

Answer 2

Preliminary answer; still hunting for other key combinations

The following post explains how to configure Alt+left/right in Iterm2. Interestingly, it requires both the configuration of .inputrc and customisation of iTerm2.