Terminal keyboard shortcuts for Mac

The line-editing chords are the oldest keyboard interface still in daily use, and they are worth learning precisely because they are not Terminal's own: the same ⌃A, ⌃E and ⌃K work in almost every text field on macOS, in most shells, and over SSH on a machine that has never heard of your Mac.

⌥D is the exception that needs a setting. It deletes forward to the end of the word only when Use Option as Meta Key is switched on for the profile, which you can toggle with ⌘⌥O.

Two of the entries here are not chords in the usual sense. The Up Arrow walks back through the commands you have entered this session, and ⌃C sends the signal that terminates most running commands — Apple documents both as the way to repeat and to stop work rather than as app shortcuts.

⌘. is the same signal from the Mac side: Apple's guide states plainly that typing it is equivalent to entering Control-C on the command line. The two reset commands are the ones to remember after a binary has sprayed control characters across your prompt.

Terminal's window commands have a second form that carries your work with them: ⌃⌘N and ⌃⌘T open a new window or tab running the same command as the current one, which is how you get a second copy of a long SSH session without retyping the host.

⌘D splits the current window into two panes and ⇧⌘D closes the split again. Note that ⌘D is a split here and a duplicate almost everywhere else on macOS — one of the few places where Terminal's chord fights the system convention.

Marks are Terminal's least-known feature and the one that makes a long build log navigable. Terminal drops a mark at each prompt, so ⌘↑ and ⌘↓ jump between commands rather than scrolling by line — the equivalent of chapter markers through a session.

A bookmark is a mark you place deliberately, optionally with a name, and ⌥⌘↑ and ⌥⌘↓ move between those alone. ⇧⌘A then selects everything between two marks, which is how you copy the output of exactly one command without dragging across a screenful of text.

Terminal has four different pastes, and the distinction is a safety feature rather than a quirk. Paste escaped text quotes anything the shell would otherwise interpret, which is what you want for a path with spaces or a string full of dollar signs pasted from a chat window.

⌘E and ⌘J are the pair worth stealing: ⌘E loads the selection into the find buffer so ⌘G walks through its other occurrences, and ⌘J jumps the view straight to the selected text after you have scrolled away from it.

The size and colour chords are the ones that matter for anything anyone else will watch. ⌘+ and ⌘- change the font size live, and the Inspector at ⌘I is where a session's title, profile and window settings live if you would rather not open Settings at all.

⇧⌘↓ and ⇧⌘↑ show and hide the alternate screen — the full-screen buffer that a pager or a text editor takes over — which lets you look back at what your prompt said before the editor opened.

A terminal recording is the hardest kind to follow, because almost nothing that happens on screen tells you which key caused it. A line clears — was that ⌃U or ⌃K? The prompt jumps — was that a mark or a scroll? Viewers who cannot see the chord end up copying the command rather than learning the workflow, which is usually the opposite of the point.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each key you press as a keycap on top of everything else on screen. It does not attach to Terminal, does not record video, and installs nothing into your shell — it is an overlay window, so any capture of the display carries it.