Dr Hjkl on the Command Line

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 21 May 2015 19:43:05 +0000

The first time I used vi was in a college programming course. It was the default editor on the computer lab's UNIX systems we used to compile our assignments. I remember when our professor first introduced vi and explained that you used the hjkl keys to move your cursor around instead of the arrow keys. Before this point, I was a pico user (that dates me a bit now), and it seemed so backward to me that vi used hjkl instead.

It wasn't until I became a heavy vim user that I began to appreciate the speed you gain from navigation keys appearing on home row. As a touch typist, I realized the arrow keys are in a no-man's land outside the home row compared to hjkl, and even though vim supported arrow keys, I used hjkl instead. I've been pleased to discover a number of different programs that also support the same level of key bindings.

I've written a few other columns in Linux Journal through the years along those lines (all with Dr Hjkl in the title), and here, I've decided to revive Dr Hjkl for another round of time-saving command-line navigation tips that will help keep your hands on the home row and off those arrow keys.

Most of my tips in this article are about reducing your reliance on the arrow keys and increasing your speed when on the command line. For many years, whenever I would find a mistake in a command I typed, I would do one of two things: use a combination of Home, End and the arrow keys (all way too far away from home row) to move the cursor back to the mistake so I could fix it, or sometimes I found it was faster to press Ctrl-C and type the whole command again. One day I observed another Linux user fly back and forth across words on the command line and realized there was a better way.

Moving Between Words

The first simple speed improvement is the use of Alt-b and Alt-f to move backward or forward one word on the command line. This behaves somewhat like the b and w keys in vi to skip between words instead of one letter at a time. Alt-b acts like just like b in vim. Press Alt-b, and the cursor will move back one word and sit at the first letter of the previous word. Alt-f is slightly different; the cursor moves forward until it ends up at the space between words instead of at the beginning of the following word. So given the following command:

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