Gather round children, for what words escape my lips will forever shift what you can do on any computer, on any application.

If this were included in the beginning course of computer science degrees, it would be accompanied with "Tell nobody of this, they cannot handle the power".

The greatest kept secret. If you know, you know.

Sometime eons ago, Richard Stallman decided to put some shortcuts into his terminal and text editor. These became known as the

readline commands

And, since that HOLY DAY, every application worth it's salt (except vim) has included it.

What are the readline commands?

Let me answer that question with a question.

What is it you do, all day at a computer?

Type. You type. Clickety-clackety, rickety rackety. Look at the computer design: those are the main keys.

Usually, you're writing prose. You know what I saw once? An upvoted reddit post about how using shift-backspace deleted whole words. Praises were poured upon this soul who discovered a mere shadow of the power of READLINE.

So, what is readline?

UNIVERSAL shortcuts for text editing.

Shortcuts :
ctrl-n : next
ctrl-p : previous

ctrl-f : forward a char
ctrl-b : backwards a char

ctrl-a : beginning
ctrl-e : end of line

ctrl-k : kill the line
ctrl-y : paste the line

alt-b : jump back a word
alt-f : jump forwards a word

Universality of READLINE

I cannot emphasize this enough

Code editors

Emacs
VSCode
Sublime text
Brackets
(think of more)
and web based editors?
OF COURSE
cloud 9
gmail
google docs
leetcode editor
overleaf
A YOUTUBE COMMENT
Mother f-beep-ing CONTENT-EDITABLE

In fact the web browser is pretty much fair game for readline

Which extends into electron software like
Obsidian
superhuman (assuming)

Terminal

The birthplace of readline, there's some extra goodies:

ctrl-x ctrl-e : open the command and edit it (ironically in a vim buffer)