Today I Learned

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Deleting Words in the Terminal

I stumbled upon this earlier today, if you're in a terminal and have typed some things in, pressing Esc, then Backspace will delete the word on or before your cursor. Ctrl + W will do the same thing.

So if I start typing a word and want to

$ one two three four 
                    ^ cursor here

Then Esc, Backspace will produce

$ one two three
               ^ cursor here

It deletes through the beginning of the word, but starts where the cursor is, so you can delete partial if your cursor is in the middle of a word

$ longer command here
            ^ cursor here

Then Esc, Backspace will produce

$ longer and here
         ^ cursor here

Confirmed both work in recent versions of bash and zsh.

See More #command-line TILs