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Episode: 2073
Title: HPR2073: The power of GNU Readline - part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2073/hpr2073.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:59:21
---
This is HPR episode 2007 to free and titled, The Power of GNU Readline Part 1.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 12 minutes long.
The summary is, and a lot you can do to speed up typing by using GNU Readline.
We'll explore how in this series.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everyone, this is Dave Morris and I'm going to talk to you today about a feature you probably know about.
It's called GNU Readline.
GNU Readline is actually a library and we all use it because
if we were pretty much all of us do anyway.
As long as we use the command line, we use applications that take input.
This is because GNU Readline is used in Bash and in many other tools.
It manages input, it does line editing and it gives you a command history feature.
It's very powerful.
Now I've been using Unix and later on Linux since probably the 1980s sometimes then.
I don't remember precisely when I first saw a Unix system or had one available to me,
but they were a little bit weird in the way in which you use the command line.
There were different experiences depending on what version of Unix you'd got,
but they did tend to have similar features.
I think that this was the early days of Readline or it was pre-readline.
There were things like jump to the start of the line, jump to the end of the line,
delete a character backwards, delete up to a space, delete the entire line,
those sorts of things that were available.
While Readline is the development of all that sort of stuff and it's very, very powerful
and I think it's worth learning about to some degree anyway because there is such a rich feature set.
Much more than I just summarized, I thought I would do a series with just a few episodes
in where I covered some of what Readline can do.
Really sort of the things that I use most and quite like and think you might like as well.
I want to keep the episode short because it's a pretty dry subject,
and if you're anything like me you can't take in more than a few key sequences at a time.
Plus also there's the advantage of maybe picking up a few and learning them
so that they get stuck in your muscle memory and then moving on to another set.
The source of my information for this series is the GNU Readline Manual
and I've put a link to that in the show notes.
It's really well written, it's got everything in it as most GNU manuals do.
It's a little bit overwhelming I find anyway.
So what I'm doing here is what I tend to do a lot in my shows these days
is to give you a sort of few pointers and to translate it for you in some way I guess.
If you already know you were around it, you used it a lot yourself,
you probably don't want to listen to this show.
So let's talk about the keys and notations and stuff.
The features in GNU Readline are invoked usually by multi key sequences
and these involve the control key and the so-called meta key.
The control key is the one on your keyboard marked CTRL
and the meta key is another name for the one marked ALT.
There are usually two ALT keys on a keyboard,
at least if it's a full size keyboard
and there's variability in which of these is the meta key sometimes both of them now.
So you'll have to investigate that for yourself I'm afraid.
So the notation in the GNU Readline manual is capital C hyphen K
to mean CTRL K meaning the character that's produced when you hold down the CTRL key
and press the K key.
So CTRL is sort of a shift key as you well aware I'm sure.
The meta key has a notation capital M hyphen K or meta K
for the sequence where you hold down the meta key and press the K key,
low case K and you get a particular character produced.
Now if you're unlucky enough not to have an ALT key or a meta key
then you can obtain the same result by pressing the escape key.
This time it's not a shift type key.
Just press the escape key, release it then press the K key to get the equivalent of meta K.
Some instances you can use the CTRL key and the meta key
so the notation for that would be capital M hyphen capital C hyphen low case K.
So that means hold down CTRL, hold down meta, press the low case K key.
If it was an uppercase K then you'd have to press the shift key as well
but I don't think there's too many of those but I haven't dug into that one yet.
I don't think you'd want to do that very often, I'm sure you could.
So what I want to do like I said is to keep these fairly short
and I'm going to just cover bunch of key sequences.
I haven't got very many this time because this is an introductory show.
I'm going to sort of limit myself to maybe 10 at a maximum,
probably less depending on how complex they are.
So let's dive into the first set of CTRL sequences that you probably already know.
So when you're typing stuff on the command line,
you can move forward and backwards on the line.
Say you start with the blank line, you start typing something.
You can if you want to move back one character, maybe you've admitted a letter.
You can move backwards one character.
You can either do that pressing the left arrow key
but not all keyboards have an arrow keys
or if they have their function, you have to press a function key as well.
CTRL B moves back one character so it's B for back.
Moving forward one character is CTRL F, lowercase F.
I always forget to say what case.
So it was CTRL lowercase B and CTRL lowercase F for backwards and forwards.
The next one is the backspace key.
Now this is not a key combination, it's just single key.
And you should have a backspace key on most keyboards.
It's up on the number line to the right hand side.
I'm probably telling you wrong because you've got a key board that's different from this.
But you should have something marked backspace.
And that just deletes the character to the left of the cursor that deletes backwards.
Then there's CTRL lowercase D
and that deletes the character underneath the cursor.
I've got an example at the end, which hopefully will help to clarify this.
So it's deleting effectively forwards,
given that your cursor is on a key, on a character I mean.
Backspace will delete to the left and CTRL D will delete under the cursor
and the line will shrink appropriately.
Now there's a del key, sometimes marked delete,
which is in the keypad area if you have that.
This is sometimes probably usually set up to be the same as CTRL under CTRL lowercase D.
It is on my setup, which is Debian testing with XFCE.
But in some cases it's the same as the backspace.
So you need to watch out for that and check it out and see which is which it is.
Okay, so let's look at a set of commands that you might not know.
I bet you will know some of them.
Well, I didn't know this first one.
And that is CTRL and underscore.
There is an alternative to this, which are put in the nodes,
but I won't go into it here because we'll get onto these sorts of weird commands later.
CTRL and underscore.
Now remember, most keyboards, the underscores on the top of the shifted key.
So you'd have to do CTRL shift and then the key with the underscore.
It depends on your keyboard and all sorts of things.
So what this does is it undoes the last editing command.
And it's a cumulative undo.
So you can undo repeatedly all the way back to the black line you started with.
Look at this a bit more later.
Okay, CTRL and lowercase A moves to the start of the line.
You probably know that one.
It's usually the same as the home key if you have one.
CTRL and lowercase E moves to the end of the line.
And this is usually the same as the end key if you have one of those.
The next one I had not really come across.
I've not really used, not got it built into my muscle memory yet.
And that is meta followed by lowercase F.
Meta lowercase F.
So you would hold the ALT key, whichever one is meta on your system and press lowercase F.
What this does is move forward a word.
And we need to define what a word is.
And it's what you'd expect it to be a sequence of letters and numbers.
You can, if you move backwards down a line, you can move forward by word.
And of course you can also move backwards by words with meta and with lowercase B.
Now, last one in this block, because I don't know about you,
I'm reaching my forgetting limit.
I don't think I could retain many more than the last one is CTRL L.
You probably know that one.
So if you're in the middle of typing a line for whatever reason you want to clear the screen,
you will do that.
And it will then reprint the line you're working on at the top of the screen.
If it's a blank line, you'll just get a blank line at the top of the screen.
But it clears the screen.
I don't think I knew that it left the command you were typing at the top of the screen when you did that.
I thought it just cleared the whole thing.
I've never done that, but I must get in the habit of doing that.
Okay, so I thought what I would do to try and explain how to use these,
which is go through a little example.
And of course there's an audio podcast.
I can't really draw your picture of it or, you know, do a movie or something.
I did toy with doing an animated gif of stuff, but I decided not to.
So I'm just going to try and read out what something you could do and what the effects would be.
See how that goes?
So if you're at a terminal and you typed the quick brown fox, those four words on no blank line,
then after the x of fox, you pressed meta-locase b.
Then that moves backwards the word.
Since you're on the x, or just after the x, it will move backwards to the beginning of the f of fox.
If you pressed meta-locase b again, then the cursor would move to the b of brown.
And if you pressed control-locase-d, the b would be deleted.
Then the cursor's on the r of brown.
Effectively, the line has been moved, the bit of the line after your cursor has been moved up and filled the gap.
Then if you typed control and underscore, the b would be restored.
But this time the cursor's on the r because it hasn't moved the cursor back to where you were when there was when you deleted the b.
Then if you pressed control underscore again,
well, there was only really one edit command on that line, which was to delete the b. You restored that.
So the only other action was that you typed the quick brown fox.
So it undoes that and the whole line is blank.
The entire text is deleted.
So that's how you can use this collection of things.
Okay, that's all I'm going to talk about this time.
The links contain a pointer to the Wikipedia article on Gnu Readline,
which is actually quite good and covers a number of these sequences,
but not all.
And it missed some of the ones that I thought were useful.
So that's why I'm doing this, really.
And the Gnu Readline manual is indicated.
So you can have a look at that as well.
Okay, I hope you find that useful.
Bye now.
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