Insert Cursor at Any Position at Command Line

By  on  

As much as I enjoy writing lengthy pieces of JavaScript APIs, techniques, and other tech brilliance, I very much enjoy providing people quick tips to make their daily dev lives better. This is one such post.

Oftentimes I'm working with long command line directives, and as you can imagine, I usually screw up the spelling of a command. Despite being in the industry forever, I didn't know you could click your way to the character position of the problem; I simply held the left or right arrow keys like an absolute caveman.

Did you know...to get to the specific character in the command, you can simply Option-click the character in the command line!

This isn't even clever, I was just to lazy to ever look it up. Huh. Well, now I know, and so do you!

Recent Features

  • By
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Spinning Rays with CSS3 Animations & JavaScript

    Thomas Fuchs, creator of script2 (scriptaculous' second iteration) and Zepto.js (mobile JavaScript framework), creates outstanding animated elements with JavaScript.  He's a legend in his own right, and for good reason:  his work has helped to inspire developers everywhere to drop Flash and opt...

  • By
    Highlight Table Rows, Columns, and Cells Using MooTools 1.2.3

    Row highlighting and individual cell highlighting in tables is pretty simple in every browser that supports :hover on all elements (basically everything except IE6). Column highlighting is a bit more difficult. Luckily MooTools 1.2.3 makes the process easy. The XHTML A normal table. The cells...

Discussion

  1. Aaron

    Found this via feedly. Very useful. I didn’t except it would work while ssh’d into a server running gnu screen, either. Saved me tones of time…

  2. This is a very helpful tip! using the arrow keys sucks especially when you are trying to get to the beginning of a long command.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!