A handful of keyboard shortcuts makes the terminal dramatically faster: no more holding the arrow key to fix a typo at the start of a long command, or retyping commands you ran five minutes ago. These work in bash (and mostly in zsh) on any Linux server, over SSH too.

Moving the cursor

Shortcut Action
Ctrl+A Start of line
Ctrl+E End of line
Alt+B / Alt+F Back / forward one word
Ctrl+B / Ctrl+F Back / forward one character
Ctrl+XX Toggle between start of line and current position

On macOS terminals, enable “Use Option as Meta key” for the Alt shortcuts.

Editing

Shortcut Action
Ctrl+U Delete from cursor to start of line
Ctrl+K Delete from cursor to end of line
Ctrl+W Delete the word before the cursor
Alt+D Delete the word after the cursor
Ctrl+Y Paste (“yank”) what you last deleted with Ctrl+U/K/W
Ctrl+T Swap the two characters before the cursor
Alt+U / Alt+L Uppercase / lowercase the word
Ctrl+_ Undo
Ctrl+X Ctrl+E Open the current command in your editor ($EDITOR)

Ctrl+X Ctrl+E is great for long one-liners: edit comfortably in vim or nano, save, and the command runs.

History

Shortcut / command Action
Ctrl+R Reverse search history (type part of a command; Ctrl+R again for older matches)
Ctrl+G Cancel the search
↑ / ↓ Previous / next command
!! Repeat the last command (sudo !! when you forgot sudo)
!$ or Alt+. Last argument of the previous command
!nginx Run the most recent command starting with “nginx”
^old^new Re-run the last command, replacing “old” with “new”
history | grep docker Search full history

Example:

mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/public
cd !$                # cd /var/www/example.com/public

Make history more useful in ~/.bashrc:

HISTSIZE=50000
HISTFILESIZE=100000
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth          # skip duplicates and commands starting with a space
HISTTIMEFORMAT='%F %T '
shopt -s histappend

Starting a command with a space keeps it out of history, which is useful when a password has to appear on the command line. See history command.

Process and job control

Shortcut Action
Ctrl+C Interrupt (stop) the running command
Ctrl+Z Suspend it (then bg to continue in the background, fg to bring it back)
Ctrl+D End of input / log out of the shell
Ctrl+\ Quit forcefully (SIGQUIT) 
jobs        # list background/suspended jobs
fg %1       # bring job 1 to the foreground
bg %1       # continue job 1 in the background

For long jobs over SSH, use tmux or screen, so they survive disconnects. See tmux and kill a process.

Screen and terminal

Shortcut Action
Ctrl+L Clear the screen (keeps the current line)
Ctrl+S Freeze output (XOFF), often pressed by accident
Ctrl+Q Unfreeze output
Shift+PgUp/PgDn Scroll (depends on the terminal)

Terminal frozen? Try Ctrl+Q first. If it’s garbled after printing binary data, type reset (blindly) and press Enter.

Stuck SSH session? Press Enter, then ~. to close the connection from the client side. See SSH keepalive.

Tab completion

  • Tab completes commands, paths, and (with bash-completion installed) options for git, systemctl, apt, docker and more.
  • Tab Tab lists all possibilities.
sudo apt install bash-completion

Quick reference

Goal Keys
Line start / end Ctrl+A / Ctrl+E
Delete word / line part Ctrl+W / Ctrl+U / Ctrl+K
Search history Ctrl+R
Last argument Alt+. or !$
Repeat with sudo sudo !!
Edit in editor Ctrl+X Ctrl+E
Unfreeze Ctrl+Q

Related: alias command and Linux prompt colors.

  • Linux
  • Bash
  • Productivity