Question

In Octave, when typing command in the command line, sometimes I need to erase the whole line and restart a new command. In Matlab, erasing the text would be done with the ESC key. In Octave this does not work. The only way I found to discard the input text is using Ctrl-C. This works, but it is ugly, as it leaves remains on the screen.

Is there a key combination to clear the line in Octave?

Answer 1

There are several clearing shortcuts defined:

• Meta-D: clear the next word¹
• Ctrl-K: clear to the end of the line
• Ctrl-U: clear the whole line
• Ctrl-L: clear the line and the screen

See more examples in the octave command-line-editing section of the manual.

For historical reasons Ctrl-U is usually controlled by your terminal rather than octave, although octave also supports it. You can test this with stty kill undef (restore with stty kill '^U').

_{¹ Meta is often bound to the Win key or the Alt key. If not hit the Esc key first and then the character that needs to be “metaified”.}