Keyboard Shortcuts for Jumping and Deleting in iTerm2

As a software engineer, I find myself using the terminal every day to run all sorts of commands. My current terminal of choice is iTerm2, which I’ve been using happily for many years.

Whenever I set up iTerm2 on a new Mac, one of the first things I do is to configure familiar keyboard shortcuts for common navigation and edit actions in the command prompt. For example, I typically configure the ⌥← shortcut, which jumps to the start of the word under the cursor.

To configure custom keyboard shortcuts in iTerm2, open the preferences dialog and navigate to the Profiles › Keys › Key Mappings tab:

Click the “+” button to add a new key mapping, or double-click an existing key mapping to edit it. For the “Jump to start of word” command, select the “Send Escape Sequence” action and send the escape sequence Esc+b:

Now, whenever you're typing a command in iTerm2, it's really easy to jump back to the start of the word (or even multiple words) to insert more text or delete part of the command — no need to repeatedly press the ← key to navigate back character by character.

Here's the full list of keyboard shortcuts that I configure for various jump and delete commands: