How to move the cursor word by word in the OS X Terminal

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I know the combination Ctrl+A to jump to the beginning of the current command, and Ctrl+E to jump to the end.

But is there any way to jump word by word, like Alt+←/→ in Cocoa applications does?

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On Mac OS X – the following keyboard shortcuts work by default. Note that you have to make Option key act like Meta in Terminal preferences (under keyboard tab)

  • alt (⌥)+F to jump Forward by a word
  • alt (⌥)+B to jump Backward by a word

I have observed that default emacs key-bindings for simple text navigation seem to work on bash shells. You can use

  • alt (⌥)+D to delete a word starting from the current cursor position
  • ctrl+A to jump to start of the line
  • ctrl+E to jump to end of the line
  • ctrl+K to kill the line starting from the cursor position
  • ctrl+Y to paste text from the kill buffer
  • ctrl+R to reverse search for commands you typed in the past from your history
  • ctrl+S to forward search (works in zsh for me but not bash)
  • ctrl+F to move forward by a char
  • ctrl+B to move backward by a char
  • ctrl+W to remove the word backwards from cursor position

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