Say my current line was:
/tmp/path/to/file:123
Now I'm at the end of this line, now I want to delete :123 by pressing some key combination, was that possible? (colon was merely mentioned as an example, it could be other chars, just wondering if I could bind keys to do that)
It's similar to what alt + Backspace does, but more specific on the word separator.
Bash or zsh are all welcomed.
Search backward for :, then delete to the end of the line: Ctrl+R : Alt+D. Ctrl+R is the history search command, and the line you're editing is part of the history. Most commands, including Alt+D, terminate the incremental history search and have their usual effect.
In vi mode: F:C
This applies in both bash and zsh (in the default configuration, I don't guarantee that there aren't exotic combinations of options in zsh that will make it react differently, and of course this assumes the default keybindings).
In bash you can try ctrl+alt+] to start the character-search-backward function, then :. The cursor will then move to the ":" you can then type alt+d to kill to the end of the current word.
If you use this often you can create a binding for it in ~/.inputrc.
These are readline functions and are documented in info: info readline.
I don't think there's a way to change readline's idea of what a word is without hacking the source.
Ctrl + R : to search.
As far as I know and from what I've just tested on bash 3.2
alt+backspace and ESC+backspace will delete the word up to the first "strange" character.
ctrl+w will delete until the first space in encountered.
From what I understood you are not scripting it but doing while typing.
In zsh, I can do this with the Emacs shortcuts. Your example above would be Alt-Backspace (or M-DEL in Emacs' lingo).
To do this, I have the following in .zshrc. (Note the URL -- I'm not taking credit for this!)
## emacs cursor-word movement (not identical but close enough)
# also necessary for this:
# /usr/share/zsh/functions/forward-word-match
# (from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10847255 )
autoload -U select-word-style
select-word-style bash
The file mentioned looks like this:
emulate -L zsh
setopt extendedglob
local curcontext=":zle:$WIDGET" word
local -a matched_words
integer count=${NUMERIC:-1}
if (( count < 0 )); then
(( NUMERIC = -count ))
zle ${WIDGET/forward/backward}
return
fi
while (( count-- )); do
match-words-by-style
# For some reason forward-word doesn't work like the other word
# commands; it skips whitespace only after any matched word
# characters.
if [[ -n $matched_words[4] ]]; then
# just skip the whitespace and the following word
word=$matched_words[4]$matched_words[5]
else
# skip the word but not the trailing whitespace
word=$matched_words[5]
fi
if [[ -n $word ]]; then
(( CURSOR += ${#word} ))
else
return 1
fi
done
return 0
