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In text editors, if I press the up and down arrow keys, it moves the cursor between lines of text.

In Bash, if I’m typing a long command that spans multiple lines and I press the up and down arrow keys, it cycles through the command history.

I want the former behavior in Bash. Is this possible? If not, is there any way to move the cursor directly up or down in a multi-line command?

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  • They move between lines... just that the line is very long.
    – vonbrand
    May 4, 2013 at 1:58

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
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No, it's not possible. Bash uses GNU Readline to handle interactive line input. There is no command in Readline that moves between display lines as you desire, nor is there a configuration variable comparable to the line-move-visual variable of GNU Emacs that causes next-line and previous-line to move by display lines.

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What I do is press CTRL + Left Arrow and it will leap to the first letter after the last space found. You can quickly get to where you need by doing this.

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Maybe you're looking for something like xiki. It's like a shell/text-editor.

Here's a video demo: http://youtu.be/bUR_eUVcABg

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  • Xiki looks amazing! I want something like that that can run on windows...
    – Max
    May 10, 2013 at 7:12
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    @Max according to the projects github page, "We just patched el4r, so there's a chance Xiki might work in windows." You can check it out here: github.com/trogdoro/xiki
    – jason
    May 11, 2013 at 17:34
  • This is startlingly neat and nerdy, but really not what I was wanting to do. I just wanted to use Bash or some other common shell. Thanks, though!
    – Frungi
    May 11, 2013 at 23:22
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You can use Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right to navigate through words rather than characters, and Home and End to go to the beginning and the end of the typed command.

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    Also, Ctrl+A to go to the beginning and Ctrl+E to go to the end
    – ignis
    May 4, 2013 at 8:35
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    @ignis you should put that in an answer.
    – evilsoup
    May 4, 2013 at 20:49
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See also the bash(1) manpage under the heading Commands for Moving section for other navigation shortcuts.

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Ctrl+A to go to the beginning and Ctrl+E to go to the end of the command.

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