I switched my shell from Bash to Zsh a few months ago and have been tinkering with my dotfiles ever since.
One cool trick I’ve found is to configure Mac-like text navigation. I’m a Textmate user and my fingers are hard coded to hit cmd ← to skip to the begining of a line, opt → to jump to the end of a word etc.
I believe that OSX’s built in terminal does this automatically since 10.7, but I’m using iTerm2 so needed something else. Turns out it’s pretty straightforward to add to your .zshrc or .zshenv file:
# Skip forward/back a word with opt-arrow bindkey '[C' forward-word bindkey '[D' backward-word # Skip to start/end of line with cmd-arrow bindkey '[E' beginning-of-line bindkey '[F' end-of-line # Delete word with opt-backspace/opt-delete bindkey '[G' backward-kill-word bindkey '[H' kill-word # Delete line with cmd-backspace bindkey '[I' kill-whole-line
Some of the actual aliases (e.g. '[C') might be different for you. These can be customised in iTerm → Preferences → Keys.
If you feel like it, you can check out the rest of my dotfiles on Github.