MacOS and Readline

2026-09-25 MacOS and Readline I'm a platform engineer by day, so I spend a lot of time at the command line. I've been using Bash for over twenty-five years and have become quite familiar with its key bindings. Some common ones are ctrl-a to go to the start of the line, ctrl-e to go to the end, but there are heaps more and they're worth learning. Those bindings come from GNU Readline.1 Any tool that has integrated with Readline will support all Readline bindings, and many, many tools have integrated. Something that many people don't know is that MacOS also supports Readline in all of its native text boxes. By default only a few of the bindings are configured, but more can be easily added. Including the following in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict will get you the configuration that I use: { "^b" = moveBackward:; "^d" = deleteForward:; "^f" = moveForward:; "^k" = deleteToEndOfLine:; "^u" = deleteToBeginningOfLine:; "^w" = deleteWordBackward:; "~b" = moveWordBackward:; "~d"…