Question

I want to use ALT + d in shell terminal to be able to kill a word.

The problem is that if I use national characters, namely cyrrilics, after pressing ALT + CyrChar I get a CyrChar on my tuned xterm and unprintable symbol on gnome terminal.

I know that it is possible to rebind this functionality to some CTRL combination, say CTRL + d with bind '"\C-d":shell-kill-word', which will work in national mode too, but is there a way to make ALT + CyrChar work similar to ALT + US-ASCII?

Answer 1

First, enter CTRL+V ALT+CyrChar in your shell. You should see something like “^[foo”. The “foo” part is what bash sees when you press ALT+CyrChar. Then use bind '"\efoo":kill-word' to bind that to the kill-word command. Make sure you replace foo with exactly what follows the ^[.

For example to bind ALT+DELETE to kill-word, I would use bind '"\e[3;3~":kill-word' since CTRL+V ALT+ prints ^[[3;3~.