Make "Home" and "End" keys work

There was an article linked in the press section of the FreeBSD site that mentioned something pretty cool. It in turn linked to another article with lots of details. More details than suit me frankly. :p But, darned useful nonetheless.

If you have to switch back and forth between W1ndows and Unix often, as do I, you may sometimes reach for a key that doesn't work as you expect it to (or at all). Sometimes when I'm in a hurry I start typing vi commands while writing an email in Outlo0k. It doesn't work. (Too bad, because when you're editing in a hurry, vi commands are what you want!) Well, getting vi or vim to plug in as the editor for Outlo0k will have to wait for another day. :) But, there are some keys that have been non-functional for me on the Unix command line. Now, I've got them back.

Like I said, the above-linked article by Anne Baretta has a ton of details. She talks about settings to enable some of these keys in X, tcsh, KDE, and more. I just scanned down to the part on bash and found what I needed. Namely, you can get the "Home", "End", and "Delete" keys working as expected on the command line in bash by creating a file named ".inputrc" in your home directory that contains the following:

"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line
"\e[3~": delete-char

As far as I can tell, you'll have to log in again to make it effective.

Wait, there's more! The article mentioned the "Ctrl-v" trick: You hit Ctrl-v and then another key or key combination and then it will show you the escape sequence that gets sent to the shell. Using that trick I discovered that the escapes for "Ctrl-LeftArrow" and "Ctrl-RightArrow" (yeah, more W1ndows lapses) and then mapped those to the appropriate bash readline commands. Just add these two lines more to "~/.inputrc" and you'll be in business with the word hopping arrows:

"\eOD": backward-word
"\eOC": forward-word

I'm in switch-hitters heaven. Furthermore, none of these bindings override the ones that were already there. That is, "Ctrl-A" still goes to the beginning of the line too, and "Alt-F" still hops the cursor forward a word, etc.

Update: Commenter Eddie led me to an interesting article at 'nixCraft' on the same subject. Playing around, I found some interesting things. First, the codes above don't work correctly in all situations!! I was doing that through ssh/PuTty. On a regular terminal, these are the codes that worked right for me:

"\e[7~": beginning-of-line #home
"\e[8~": end-of-line #end
"\e[3~": delete-char #delete
"\eOd": backward-word #ctl-leftarrow
"\eOc": forward-word #ctl-rightarrow

Secondly, if you're on a machine with multiple (command-line) users, then it makes little sense for everyone to have to create the same "~/.inputrc" file. You need only create one file with those readline settings in it, I suggest "/usr/local/etc/inputrc", and then point everyone to it by putting this line into "/etc/profile":

export INPUTRC='/usr/local/etc/inputrc'