Getting <ctrl> + <backspace> to delete words in gnome-terminal and vim insert mode

Question

It seems like <ctrl> + W deletes backwards one word at a time. That's great, but I'd really really this work with <ctrl> + <backspace> like most other apps.

What's the best way to do this? I'd need the change to affect gnome-terminal commands, command line vim and GUI vim.

Answer 1

Note that this will work in the terminal and the default emacs mode (which you are using if Ctrl+W deletes the previous word for you). It will not work in bash's vi mode and will not affect vi/vim itself. This is, therefore, only a partial answer but the best this emacs user can offer.

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This sort of thing is managed by the readline library whose behavior can be controlled via ~/.inputrc. Edit (or create, if it doesn't exist) ~/.inputrc and add this line:

"\C-?":"\C-W"

Now, open a new terminal and it should work.

Explanation

The \C-? is actually Control+BackSpace. You can see keycodes by pressing Ctrl+V then, the key you are after. You will see that BackSpace returns ^?.

Now, it should be possible to bind Control+BackSpace to the bash function that deletes the previous word (backward-kill-word or unix-word-rubout) by using "\C-?": backward-kill-word. However, I can't get that to work. It works perfectly well with different keys ("\C-E": backward-kill-word, for example, makes Ctrl+E delete the previous word) but for some reason, I can't get it to work with BackSpace.

So, as a workaround, we just map Ctrl+Backspace to Ctrl+W which is already mapped to backward-kill-word. So, when you press Ctrl+Backspace, that will be translated to Ctrl+W which, in turn, will send backward-kill-word. I got the idea for this workaround from this SU post.

Answer 2

Up until very recently, gnome-terminal emitted the same code on Backspace and Ctrl+Backspace, hence you cannot distinguish the two in your application.

This was fixed in vte-0.42, which is part of Gnome 3.18 released this autumn.

If you're using Wily, you can find updated packages in Gnome3 Staging.