In all GUI text editors, web browsers and IDE’s you can move a cursor:
- left/right arrows - move by char;
- ctrl+left/right - move by word;
- home/end - move to start/end of line.
Add Shift to any of above combination and everything you jumped through now is selected and you can: Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X,Delete to copy/cut/delete selection.
Also, you can Ctrl+Delete and Ctrl+Backspace to delete a next/previous word.
Also, you can Ctrl+Home/End to jump to start of first line or end of last line.
I want this to work when I type in a command in my Terminal.
Is it possible in Linux? It’s a vanilla experience in Windows+Powershell, thanks to default PSReadlLine extension. It works both in conhost.exe and in Windows Terminal, but doesn’t work in WT + cmd.exe, which makes me think it’s PSReadLine which is responsible for this technological perfection.
“But you can’t copy with Ctrl+C, it’s…” - You can. When something is selected It copies selection to clipboard, otherwise it sends SIGINT.
I’m not bound to any distro or terminal application, but right now I don’t see these incredible text editing techniques working even in Ubuntu+Powershell+PSReadLine, to say nothing about the Bash. I’ve tried installing WezTerm, but it doesn’t have text selection either, at least by default. And I’m inclined to think it has nothing to do with terminal emulators at all, since it works in conhost.exe+Powershell.
Macintosh has nothing to do with it. Maybe I want to grow selection to the left with E and to the right with R - they are not Macintosh keys, but still I will have a hard time trying to get what I want.
Do you mean this whole concept of growing selection from the same cursor you type with and performing operations on this selected area as a single entity is a Macintosh-way, originated in GUI? And its foreign to terminals and terminals developed a different way of editing text and you propose learning this native text-editing without using foreign techniques like cursor-based text selection… This makes sense. And sure it’s possible to be effective in terminal while using it traditional way. If this is what you mean, now I understand.
I made a glimpse on the world where this shift-selection doesn’t exist and got excited about this feature even more, and I even think it’s genius.
System-wide clipboard is probably not the “traditional way” either, and it doesn’t work quite well in Linux terminals too.
A couple of years ago I invested some time into Vim and it was a pleasant experience, but it was detached from all other experiences I had on my PC. Mentally switching between different text editing modes is disgusting, I hate it so much. I don’t want a new one. I’m fine with the one I have.
Linux and its terminals are meaningful only as long as they do what I want them to do. I don’t care if some of my activities are “not Linux-way”.
Yeah when I call them the Macintosh keys that’s because I’m almost 100% that the 84 Macintosh was the first thing to use them. Not just the keys specifically, but that operating model we I guess later called wysiwyg. I think it was command instead of control, but it occupies the same place on the keyboard. It’s certainly the oldest thing I’ve used that had them. Windows used to do it like old dos word processors did, with insert and delete etc.
It’s the design and interface language of gui software for at least 40 years and everyone should know it.
System wide clipboard would work fine in the terminal but it would be a downgrade, you’d have to give up all the lovely buffers that all your different editors use and are designed around. Even lowly less has a buffer select somewhere in there. Most of the time shift-ctrl-v lets me dump the whatever the system clipboard is out into the command prompt if I need to.
If the idea of using a different modality for editing text bugs you so much, what do you think of the fact that you already use one? When you’re typing your fingers are on the home row and when you need to edit you switch your right hand to the arrow and function keys. It’s a lot like how editing in vim requires me to move my right hand one key over to the left.
That way of thinking is how I was able to accept learning vi keys and vim about twenty years ago when I had the same thoughts as you about new shortcuts.
An alternative might be using macos. I can’t remember if it uses the mac keys to cut and paste into its terminals but it might.