I know I can delete backward one word at a time, but many times I just want to change part of a path. Is there a command in emacs and therefore keyboard command in bash to delete backward just until a slash?
alt+w does one word at a time: How can I delete a word backward at the command line (bash and zsh)?
Well, I realized a simple solution.. basically to use ctrl+left-arrow to skip back to the point I want to change. Then press ctrl+k to delete forward.
(just an aside, ctrl+left-arrow doesnt always work on some terminals, GCP remote ssh shell for example, and I wonder why)
If you are in vi mode (set -o vi), you do Esc to return to normal mode, then db (delete to beginning).
If you are in emacs mode (typically the default), you can do CtrlR for backwards search, then / to search for the slash, finally altd to delete forward.
From what I understand, you want to properly configure GNU-readline (which handles text edition at GNU-bash's prompt)
In Bash, you can type
bind '"\ew": backward-kill-word'
Then test.
To make this permanent, as a user, you can edit ~/.inputrc, which takes priority over the system config in /etc/inputrc. You can $include /etc/inputrc in ~/.inputrc to inherit from it.
You want to have this line:
"\ew": backward-kill-word
This often defaults to unix-word-rubout, or even a shell or bash prefixed macro, which takes only white space as a delimiter. But backward-kill-word will take anything that is "not a letter nor a digit".
Refer to man 3 readline for full documentation.
