Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Skip words in the terminal when using iTerm Zshell in OS X El Capitan


So, you want to skip words (move the cursor word by word rather than character by character to left or right) in the terminal. And you are using 
  • Zshell with iTerm
  • OS X el capitan (10.11+)
but cannot set the word skipping in the terminal usual way. Then the following instructions are for you.
  • Add the following line to ~/.zshrc
  • bindkey -e
    bindkey '\e\e[C' forward-word
    bindkey '\e\e[D' backward-word
  • Go to
  • System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts → Mission Control
  • Uncheck the mission control shortcuts Move left a space and Move right a space 

  • Done
Thought of writing this up as the information is scattered. Thank goes to the original authors. Please leave a comment if this is not working for you.