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I've seen dozens of articles that talk about making terminal life better by switching to iTerm2 and then turning on "Natural Text Editing" under Profile > Keys. Then you can use the normal option+left/right to move between words.

I have tried that, and it works.. One time. I can jump back exactly one word, and then I just get a bell any time I try moving left or right with option. If I hit enter, the command works as expected. And at the next prompt I'm allowed to cursor over one word and then it stops again.

I have tried the same in the default Terminal app and get the same results. I can move one word, and then bells.

In playing around with the keys, after option+left arrow the one time, I can still move around normally with the left and right cursor arrows. But I seem to be in some weird vim-like shortcut mode as hitting b moves me back and w moves me forward. Typing v puts me in a vim-like editor (:q to get back to the command prompt.

This is on a brand new M1 Macbook Pro, v12.1, using bash if it makes a difference.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I found my problem.

Deep in the recesses of my .bash_profile was the command

set -o vi

Which effectively made my prompt work like vi after it detected the ESC character from going back a word. After I removed the line, things work like I expected.

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I faced a similar problem with oh my zsh and the zsh-vi-mode plugin enabled. After disabling the plugin, Natural Text Editing works just fine.

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