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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

The number of times i realized half way that I probably posted the wrong password and so I vigorously type the 'delete' key to reset the input is too damn high

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Just type Control-U once.

The Just in that sentence is wholly unjustified. There are plenty of cli/tui/console/shell shortcuts that are incredibly useful, yet they are wholly undiscoverable and do not work cross-platform, e.g. shell motions between macOS and reasonable OSes.

> shell motions between macOS and reasonable OSes

All the movement commands I know work the same in the terminal on a default install of macOS as it does in the terminal on various Linux distros I use.

Ctrl+A to go to beginning of line

Ctrl+E to go to end of line

Esc, B to jump cursor one word backwards

Esc, F to jump cursor one word forward

Ctrl+W to delete backwards until beginning of word

And so on

Both in current versions of macOS where zsh is the default shell, and in older versions of macOS where bash was the default shell.

Am I misunderstanding what you are referring to by shell motions?

Yea, but ctrl + arrows to move cursor between ‘words’ don’t work, especially sad when SSH’ing in from linux. It works fine when using terminal on macOS - you just use command + arrows.

Works fine for me. Configure your shell.

What happens when you press home or end?

In iTerm at least it goes to the beginning or end of current line.

These are emacs bindings of yore. On macOS and some Linux DEs they also work in UI text fields :)

> e.g. shell motions between macOS and reasonable OSes.

I forgot about this since I started NixOS/home-manager everywhere.

The number of times I’ve attempted to use Ctrl-U in a Python shell only to discover it doesn’t work…

Haven't seen this - shouldn't this always work on unixy platforms? If using readline/editline it works, and if built without it also works.

It’s an internal, custom, vaguely UNIX-like shell in Windows. Typically I’m running Python from bash; Ctrl-U works under bash, but not Python.

I only know this because of xkcd

That's great. I've been using terminals for 20+ years, and never new about CTRL-U. Thanks! TIL.

It's built into the Unix terminal driver. Control-U is the default, but it can be changed with e.g. "stty kill". Libraries like readline also support it.

The number of times I've posted my sudo password in a random slack channel instead of my terminal is not very high, but too damn high nonetheless

Start your password with a forward slash :)

The trick is to use a plausible Slack message as your sudo password :)

“I quit!” Even includes a special character

"I, uhh, need your thoughts." should have fewer consequences AND be more secure.

Did you just type in your password on HN?

hunter2

I have had a similar issue where I thought my computer went to sleep so I start typing my password while the monitor wakes up only to realize that it was only the screen that turned off and the computer was already unlocked so when I hit enter the password was sent into a slack thread or dm instead

Get out of my head, lol :)

But yeh, never thought this was a problem anyone else delt with. My passwords are all a variant of my on "master password" and sometimes forget which session I'm in so trying to save keystrokes, count backward to where I think the cursor should be.

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