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Comment by tristian | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I just saw this nugget in one of the comments: VI mode for the standard Terminal.

Add "set -o vi" to your profile and you get access to same modality and commands of VI. Damn, I wish I knew about this option earlier.

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Note that I think that's a Bash thing, and the default is Emacs-style bindings (C-a, C-e, C-p, C-n) which include C-r for reverse interactive search of the history. I use that every day, a dozen or more times.

My favorite is C-t to correct typos like 'liek' instead of 'like', I put the cursor between the e and the k and i press C-t.

It's actually a Readline thing.

Yeah, that makes sense. Still, my point was that it's not specific to Terminal.app, so someone on another Unix would probably find it useful.

Something I've always wondered though - did emacs take them from readline or did readline take them from emacs? How old is readline? Where did all of those C-a, C-e, etc conventions come from?

They came from emacs. Readline is now around v6, readline v2 seems to have been from the mid 1990s.

There is a smaller set of standard commands for killing (C-h for char, C-w for word, C-u for line) which are used in many terminal apps. They are orthogonal to emacs, and probably about as old (1970s).

Those emacs style editing commands actually came from TECO in the 70s. Crazy that those editing commands are hardwired into my brain nearly 40 years later.

This one is not OSX specific though. I've tried it and can not get used to it even though I'm a VIM user at heart. I think not seeing the mode I'm in was tripping me up.

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