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
    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...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using Opacity to Show Focus with MooTools

    I'm a huge fan of using subtle effects like link nudging (jQuery, MooTools) to enhance the user experience and increase the perceived dynamism of my websites. Trust me -- a lot of little things are what take websites to the next level.

  • By
    jQuery Random Link Color Animations

    We all know that we can set a link's :hover color, but what if we want to add a bit more dynamism and flair? jQuery allows you to not only animate to a specified color, but also allows you to animate to a random color. The...

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!