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
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • 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
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

  • By
    MooTools History Plugin

    One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads.  Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes?  It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth.  Unfortunately...

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!