How do you configure .inputrc so ALT+UP has the effect of cd

Question

It should be possible to do that by having ALT+UP generate consecutive keyboard input equivalent to cdspace..ENTER by means of a macro definition. But can't figure out how exactly to do it.

Answer 1

To do literally what you're asking, put the following line in your ~/.inputrc:

"\e\e[A": "cd ..\n"

Here \e\e[A is byte sequence that your terminal sends when you press Alt+Up (\e is parsed as the escape character), some terminals might send \e[1;3A~ or some other sequence instead. To find out what sequence your terminal sends, run cat and press the key (escape will display as ^[).

In bash, you can in principle bind a key to shell code, so in theory this should work:

bind -x '"\e\e[A":cd ..'

However as of bash 4.2 it doesn't work due to a hard-to-fix implementation bug. Zsh expert Stéphane Chazelas has a workaround:

bind -x '"\201":cd ..'
bind '"\e\e[A":"\201"'

The effect is somewhat confusing because the prompt isn't redrawn.

In bash ≥4, add shopt -s autocd to your ~/.bashrc. Then you can change to the parent directory (or any directory) by entering just .., without having to type the cd command.