These are really basic examples, and it doesn't get much more complex than this. After you type the command you had forgotten, you may go two commands back in history by typing ' kk' (or ' 2k'), erase the ' #' character which was appended as a comment and execute the command, this makes the whole command look like ' ESC 2k0x ENTER'. No need to erase the current command! You can switch to command mode by hitting ESC and then type ' #' which will send the current command as a comment in the command history. Suppose you typed a long command and remembered that you had to execute another one before it. You can type ' v' to edit the command in the editor and not on the command line! Suppose you typed a longer command and you noticed that you had made several mistakes, and wanted to do the correction in the vi editor itself. Or even quicker, you can type ' f2r5', where ' f2' moves the cursor right to next occurrence of character ' 2' and ' r5' replaces the character under the cursor with character ' 5'. To do this, you can type ' cw' which means 'change word' and just type out ' arg5': Suppose you wanted to change arg2 to arg5: Now, enter insert mode by hitting ' i' and type ' arg5 ' Hit ' ESC' to switch to command mode and press ' 3' followed by ' B':Īlternatively you could have hit ' B' three times: ' BBB'. $ echo arg1 (want to insert arg5 here) arg2 arg3 arg4 Suppose you have typed a command with a few arguments and want to insert another argument before an argument which is three words backward. The example will be performed on this command: Once you have changed the readline editing mode to vi (by typing set -o vi), you will be working in insert mode. Let ' ' be the position of cursor in insert mode in all the examples and ' ' be the position of cursor in command mode. Here are a few examples with screenshots to illustrate the vi editing mode. In insert mode everything you type gets output to the terminal, but in the command mode the keys are used for various commands.
The editing happens in two modes - command mode and insert mode. If you are used to a vi text editor you will feel yourself at home. In your bash shell (to switch back to emacs editing mode, type set -o emacs). You may inspect your current keyboard mappings with bash's built in bind command:Ībort can be found on "\C-g", "\C-x\C-g", "\M-\C-g".Īccept-line can be found on "\C-j", "\C-m".Īlias-expand-line is not bound to any keys The difference between the two modes is what command each key combination (or key) gets bound to. This time I am going to introduce you to bash's vi editing mode and give out a detailed cheat sheet with the default keyboard mappings for this mode. Emacs editing mode is the default and I already wrote an article and created a cheat sheet for this mode. Bash provides two modes for command line editing - emacs and vi.