Terminal Keyboard Shortcuts Worth Learning

There are two kinds of terminal user: those who press the up arrow thirty times to find a command they ran last Tuesday, and those who press three keys. This cheat sheet is for anyone wishing to defect to the second group.

The line-editing shortcuts below come from readline (Bash) and Zsh’s equivalent, both of which default to the same Emacs-style bindings — so learn them once and they work essentially everywhere, including most database consoles and REPLs. A rare case where the industry standardised on something decent and moved on.

The one shortcut to learn today

Ctrl+R — reverse search through your command history. Press it, start typing any fragment of the command you want, and the shell finds the most recent match. Press Ctrl+R again to step further back through matches, Enter to run the result, or the arrow keys to edit it first.

If you memorise nothing else from this page, memorise that. It’s the single highest-yield keystroke in the terminal.

Tip

Want your history search fuzzy? fzf replaces Ctrl+R with a full-screen fuzzy finder once you add its shell integration — same keystroke, noticeably better memory than yours.

Moving around the line

Shortcut	Effect
Ctrl+A	Jump to start of line
Ctrl+E	Jump to end of line
Alt+B	Back one word
Alt+F	Forward one word
Ctrl+B / Ctrl+F	Back / forward one character (the arrow keys, for purists)

Note

On macOS, Alt shortcuts need your terminal to treat Option as Meta, and almost nothing does it unprompted — Option is busy typing accented characters. iTerm2: Settings → Profiles → Keys → set the left Option key to “Esc+”. Terminal.app: Settings → Profiles → Keyboard → tick “Use Option as Meta key”. Warp: Settings → Features → “Left Option key is meta”. Ghostty decides for you based on your keyboard layout — on for U.S. Standard and U.S. International, off for every other layout — so if Alt+B does nothing, put macos-option-as-alt = true in your config rather than doubting your fingers.

Editing like you mean it

Shortcut	Effect
Ctrl+U	Cut everything before the cursor (Zsh: the whole line)
Ctrl+K	Cut everything after the cursor
Ctrl+W	Cut the word before the cursor
Alt+D	Cut the word after the cursor
Ctrl+Y	Paste the most recently cut text
Ctrl+_	Undo
Alt+.	Insert the last argument of the previous command (repeat to go further back)

The Ctrl+U / Ctrl+K / Ctrl+W cuts go onto a paste buffer, so “cut” here is really “cut with intention to re-use” — Ctrl+Y brings it back, even in a different command. The one place the two shells part company is Ctrl+U: Bash cuts back to the start of the line, while Zsh takes the entire line with it, cursor position be damned.

Alt+. deserves special mention: retyping the long path from your previous command is a mug’s game. mkdir some/deeply/nested/path followed by cd + Alt+. is the civilised alternative.

History without the up arrow

Shortcut	Effect
Ctrl+R	Reverse-search history (see above; it’s that important)
Ctrl+G	Abandon the search
Ctrl+P / Ctrl+N	Previous / next history entry (the up/down arrows, but closer)
!!	Re-run the previous command
!$	The last argument of the previous command
!ssh	Re-run the most recent command starting with ssh

Yes, sudo !! — re-run the last command but with sudo — works, and remains the most satisfying two characters in computing after a permission error.

Process control

Shortcut	Effect
Ctrl+C	Kill the foreground process (SIGINT)
Ctrl+Z	Suspend the foreground process
Ctrl+D	End of input — exits the shell if the line is empty
Ctrl+L	Clear the screen (keeps your scrollback, unlike clear on a bad day)

Worth knowing that these are the keys terminal tools fight over. tmux claims exactly one of them (Ctrl+B); Zellij claims about eight, all of which the shell was using first — which is a genuine argument against it, and one its own locked mode exists to answer.

Ctrl+Z deserves better than its reputation as “the key I pressed by accident”. Suspended jobs are listed with jobs, resumed in the foreground with fg, or sent to the background with bg — handy when you realise thirty seconds into a long task that you still need your terminal.

Caution

If your terminal ever appears to freeze completely and stops echoing keystrokes, you probably pressed Ctrl+S by mistake — it pauses output (a feature from the 1970s that persists purely to torment the living). Ctrl+Q unfreezes it. To retire the trap permanently, add stty -ixon to your shell config.

Tabs, panes and windows

Line editing is only half the story — the other half is wrangling the terminal window itself. Defaults for the popular options (all customisable; check your app’s keybindings if these feel off):

Action	iTerm2	Warp	Ghostty	Windows Terminal
New tab	Cmd+T	Cmd+T	Cmd+T	Ctrl+Shift+T
New window	Cmd+N	Cmd+N	Cmd+N	Ctrl+Shift+N
Close tab	Cmd+W	Cmd+W	Cmd+W	Ctrl+Shift+W
Next / previous tab	Cmd+Shift+] / [	Cmd+Shift+] / [	Cmd+Shift+] / [	Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Split pane right	Cmd+D	Cmd+D	Cmd+D	Alt+Shift++
Split pane down	Cmd+Shift+D	Cmd+Shift+D	Cmd+Shift+D	Alt+Shift+-
Search scrollback	Cmd+F	Cmd+F	Cmd+F	Ctrl+Shift+F

Windows Terminal’s Alt+Shift+D is a third thing again: it duplicates the current pane and picks the split direction for you, which is either convenient or infuriating depending on how attached you are to knowing where the new pane will land.

Notable by absence: Alacritty ships without tabs or panes at all, on principle — the expectation being that you pair it with tmux, which has a cheat sheet of its own and a separate personality. kitty, for contrast, does the whole job itself; the two are worth comparing before you commit to either philosophy.

If none of these defaults appeal, the apps differ wildly in how configurable they are — our terminal emulator roundup covers the trade-offs, and on macOS the shortlist is usually Ghostty or iTerm2.

Now the rest of the setup

Fast fingers deserve a prompt that keeps up — see customising your shell prompt with Starship. And if you’re going to press keys this enthusiastically, you may as well enjoy the sound they make: our mechanical keyboard roundup has you covered.