Reference: Control-arrow keys in screen, SSH, etc.

2012 March 10

I’ve often had trouble with the keybindings Control-Leftarrow and Control- Rightarrow not doing what I want on “nonstandard” terminals: SSHing into Macs, some GNU screen instances, etc. I think the basic issue is that there are several ways to bind these keys, and some systems don’t have systems set up to cover all of the cases. Here’s the ~/.inputrc file that does the trick for me:

"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word
"\e[;5C": forward-word
"\e[;5D": backward-word
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word
"\e\e[C": forward-word
"\e\e[D": backward-word
Meta-.: yank-last-arg
Meta-_: yank-last-arg

With a bonus explicit binding of Alt-period, which is also sometimes missing. In my explorations I discovered that for SSHing into OS X / Darwin computers, the third pair is the one that’s relevant.