Teminal Cheatsheet

Make your workflow faster on terminal.

Ratan Kulshreshtha published on
4 min, 621 words

Categories: Cheatsheet

Tags: terminal short-cuts

Sweet and simple tldr; terminal cheatsheet.

Working With Processes

  • Ctrl+C - Interrupt (kill) the current foreground process running in in the terminal. This sends the SIGINT signal to the process, which is technically just a request—most processes will honor it, but some may ignore it.
  • Ctrl+Z - Suspend the current foreground process running in bash. This sends the SIGTSTP signal to the process. To return the process to the foreground later, use the fg process_name command.
  • Ctrl+D - Close the bash shell. This sends an EOF (End-of-file) marker to bash, and bash exits when it receives this marker. This is similar to running the exit command.

Controlling the Screen

  • Ctrl+L - Clear the screen. This is similar to running the “clear” command.
  • Ctrl+S - Stop all output to the screen. This is particularly useful when running commands with a lot of long, verbose output, but you don’t want to stop the command itself with Ctrl+C.
  • Ctrl+Q - Resume output to the screen after stopping it with Ctrl+S.

Moving the Cursor

  • Ctrl+A or Home - Go to the beginning of the line.
  • Ctrl+E or End - Go to the end of the line.
  • Alt+B - Go left (back) one word.
  • Ctrl+B - Go left (back) one character.
  • Alt+F - Go right (forward) one word.
  • Ctrl+F - Go right (forward) one character.
  • Ctrl+XX - Move between the beginning of the line and the current position of the cursor. This allows you to press Ctrl+XX to return to the start of the line, change something, and then press Ctrl+XX to go back to your original cursor position. To use this shortcut, hold the Ctrl key and tap the X key twice.

Deleting Text

  • Ctrl+D or Delete - Delete the character under the cursor.
  • Alt+D - Delete all characters after the cursor on the current line.
  • Ctrl+H or Backspace - Delete the character before the cursor.

Fixing Typos

  • Alt+T- Swap the current word with the previous word.
  • Ctrl+T - Swap the last two characters before the cursor with each other. You can use this to quickly fix typos when you type two characters in the wrong order.
  • Ctrl+_ - Undo your last key press. You can repeat this to undo multiple times.

Cutting and Pasting

  • Ctrl+W - Cut the word before the cursor, adding it to the clipboard.
  • Ctrl+K - Cut the part of the line after the cursor, adding it to the clipboard.
  • Ctrl+U - Cut the part of the line before the cursor, adding it to the clipboard.
  • Ctrl+Y - Paste the last thing you cut from the clipboard. The y here stands for “yank”.

Capitalizing Characters

  • Alt+U - Capitalize every character from the cursor to the end of the current word, converting the characters to upper case.
  • Alt+L - Uncapitalize every character from the cursor to the end of the current word, converting the characters to lower case.
  • Alt+C - Capitalize the character under the cursor. Your cursor will move to the end of the current word.

Working With Your Command History

  • Ctrl+P or Up Arrow - Go to the previous command in the command history. Press the shortcut multiple times to walk back through the history.
  • Ctrl+N or Down Arrow - Go to the next command in the command history. Press the shortcut multiple times to walk forward through the history.
  • Alt+R- Revert any changes to a command you’ve pulled from your history if you’ve edited it.
  • Ctrl+R - Recall the last command matching the characters you provide. Press this shortcut and start typing to search your bash history for a command.
  • Ctrl+O - Run a command you found with Ctrl+R.
  • Ctrl+G - Leave history searching mode without running a command.