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Terminal may be using some kind of Readline, I dunno. But text objects in other OS X applications use emacs keybindings because NeXTSTEP has had them since time immemorial. Like 1990 or so. Doesn't have anything to do with GNU Readline so far as I know.

It's not Terminal that uses it; it's bash, and most shells that imitate bash.

> Terminal may be using some kind of Readline

Terminal.app passes the key sequences to the application running inside of the terminal. The default shell (bash) uses GNU readline, which has an emacs-mode and a vi-mode (emacs is the default).

Terminal.app does not use any Cocoa text fields, so has nothing to do with the Emacs keybindings inherited from NeXTSTEP.

IIRC, someone mentioned to me once that bash doesn't link against libreadline, but uses libreadline (the source is directly in the Bash repo), so it's possible that it's using GNU readline, while Apple's libreadline is a BSD flavour.

It at least used to be the case that GNU Readline was GPL-licensed, instead of LGPL, as to make readline a "carrot" to encourage GPL adoption. That shouldn't be an issue for bash, which is also GPL licensed.