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
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    MooTools, Mario, and Portal

    I'm a big fan of video games. I don't get much time to play them but I'll put down the MacBook Pro long enough to get a few games in. One of my favorites is Portal. For those who don't know, what's...

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!