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Here are a list of hot keys that work the most universally as possible for text editing. There are so many hot keys and yet so little time. Which hot keys should you learn? If you work in the command line and on a Macintosh (OSX) this is the right chart for you. The first chart goes over the hot keys that are most ubiquitous. These have been selected for their wide support. If you are going to learn only a few these are the ones to learn. Then below, (as a plus) I get into specific common hot keys that I use in different applications.

I use the escape key (esc) for my meta key. You may not be set up to use the escape key as the meta key so keep that in mind. What is the meta key? This is normally escape but you can configure iterm to bind another key to meta if you want. See “The Meta Key" bellow if you want to know more.

What are each of the items in the header in the chart below?

Emacs is an old text editor from Unix many of the hotkeys from the editor were adopted at early stages into the OSX text fields and text editors. Most legacy Emacs hotkeys can be used for editing text in OSX. Atom is a text editor from git hub that is a lot like sublime text. Readline is the line editor used when you are working at the terminal.

When I say universal(ish) I mean that these are hot keys that are available in most text editors that coders use but sometimes configurations have to be done in order to get them to work universally.

✓ - supported

- works because of configuration (see below)

- doesn’t work, minor exception

Other keys that interestingly share a few applications:

If you are using a Mac and you are using the built in terminal I suggest downloading ITerm2 instead so that you can change command mappings to make the terminal easier with which to work.

The meta key is just a place holder word for whatever key you want to bind to it. In ITerm you can bind the left option key or the right option key to the meta key if you like by going here:

1.) Click : Menu -> Preferences...

2.) Click “Profiles" tab

3.) Click your profile or the default one

4.) Click the “Keys" sub tab

5.) Click the “+" plus sign next to “Load Preset…"

6.) Type your keyboard shortcut in the first field

7.) Choose either “Send Text", “Send Hex" (more on sending Hex in “How to bind a key sequence to the control key" below or “Send Escape Sequence". In this case we are using “Send Escape Sequence"

8.) In the last field choose characters that read line can interpret. (see references for about readline)

“^[" is the read line sequence for escape. This entry maps opt+→ to esc+f (may be alt+f in other terminals)

This effectively maps the emacs short cut to a read line shortcut.

1.) Download “Key Codes" from the app store. Install it and open it.

2.) Hit the control+[some key] in this case I’ll use ctrl+w.

3.) The code in the red square is the code we want to send to the terminal

4.) Now map your key sequence using in iterm, preferences->Keys->+

5.) Remove the "23 /" and keep 0x17 in the field under action. 0x17 is the valid hexidecimal. This will now map opt+←delete to ctrl+w in the terminal, but you can use it to map any key to another one.

Mostly this post is focused on universal hotkeys that you can use almost every where. But if you’re interested, here is a bonus. A lot of blog posts about hotkeys and workflows have a lot of key sequences that people don’t really use frequently. These are shortcuts that I use almost every day. If you’re looking for a few candidates to add to your skills look through the lists below.

When you are in the text editor vi or you are using vim-mode in Atom ( vim-mode is an Atom plugin)

When you are in the text editor Atom and using this plugin that models Sublime text editor functionality ( ctrl-dir-scroll is an Atom plugin)

These will work when you are in the terminal (command line.) These are picked up by the GNU Readline library which is embedded in Bash, other shells and many other pieces of software. Readline is a line editor as apposed to a a multiline editor.

HOT KEYS	NOTES
to copy text 1.) cmd+f 2.) type text 3.) tab (select right) or shift+tab (select left) 4.) esc 5.) cmd+c (to copy) 6.) cmd+p (to paste)