vi mode inside your shell

For as long as I can remember I’ve used vim (or vi) as my editor of choice when on Linux or UNIX systems. I’ve also used bash as my shell, except in circumstances where it wasn’t available. We’ve been using Macs for a long time now, and one of the things that I only recently learnt was that you can use CTRL-a to take you to the beginning of a line in a terminal. This meant I no longer leant on the left arrow key to get me back to the beginning of a long command.

I use screen to maintain remote, active connections to our various servers, and with my setup the CTRL-a trick didn’t work. I’ve just found that setting vi mode in bash will allow me to hit ESC then shift-I and take me to the beginning of a line. ESC engages vi mode, and you can navigate around the command as you would inside vi. For example, shift-I or 0 takes you to the start of the line, shift-a or $ to the end and h, l, k and j act as cursor keys.

You can engage vi mode by executing the following code, or adding it to your ~/.profile (or any other dot file that is executed upon login).

set -o vi

I always like finding new shortcuts, even if there’s some minor annoyance at my former lack of awareness. It’s like how we discovered syntax highlighting in vim after completing our uni degrees… very bittersweet.