Emacs Mode in Zsh

Using Emacs Keybindings in Zsh

The default mode for typing in a Bash or Zsh shell is Emacs. It’s quite simple to update this to use Vim style bindings by entering bindkey -v in the shell, or by adding it to your .bashrc or .zshrc file. It can be canged back to Emacs mapping with bindkey -e.

However, we’re just going to take a quick look at the default bindings and make it just a bit easier to make quick ninja edits to the current command.

Shortcut	Action
Movement
`Ctrl` + `a`	Go to the start of the line
`Ctrl` + `e`	Go to the end of the line
Hold `Ctrl` + `x`, `x`	Jump between the beginning and the end of the line
`Ctrl` + `b`	Go back one character
`Ctrl` + `f`	Go forward one character
`Alt` + `b`	Go back one word
`Alt` + `f`	Go forward one word
Editing
`Alt` + `Del`	Delete previous word
`Alt` + `d`	Delete next word
`Ctrl` + `w`	Cut the previous word
`Ctrl` + `k`	Cut to the end of the line
`Ctrl` + `u`	Cut to the beginning of the line
`Ctrl` + `h`	Same as `Backspace`
`Ctrl` + `d`	Same as `Del`
`Alt` + `t`	Swap current and previous words
`Ctrl` + `t`	Swap previous two characters
`Escape` + `t`	Swap previous two words
Misc
`Ctrl` + `y`	Paste (confusingly called “yank” from Emacs)
`Alt` + `u`	Uppercase the rest of the word
`Alt` + `l`	Lowercase the rest of the word
`Ctrl` + `_`	Undo
`Ctrl` + `v`	Allow the next special character to be output to the terminal, e.g. `Escape`, `Enter`, or `Tab`

You may also review all of the key bindings by calling bindkey -M emacs