Change your readline config to traverse by words

The readline library controls the behavior of most shell programs, including bash, the mysql client and python (though you have to import readline to get this behavior).

This is what gives you ^A to go to the beginning of the line and ^E to go to the end of line. (Note these will also work in many text fields in Mac OS programs).

By default ^F moves the cursor forward one character, and ^B goes back one character. This is fairly useless as any modern keyboard comes with arrow keys.

I overloaded ^F and ^B to instead go forward and backward by words, by adding these lines to ~/.inputrc:


"\C-b" backward-word
"\C-f" forward-word

Another option I always, always set in .inputrc is set completion-ignore-case on.

See man readline for your options. There is actually a vast number of settings compared to the puny set of defaults.