How to move the cursor word by word in the OS X Terminal

Out of the box you can use the quite bizarre Esc+F to move to the beginning of the next word and Esc+B to move to the beginning of the current word.

On Mac OS X - the following keyboard shortcuts work by default. Note that you have to make Option key act like Meta in Terminal preferences (under keyboard tab)

• alt (⌥)+F to jump Forward by a word
• alt (⌥)+B to jump Backward by a word

I have observed that default emacs key-bindings for simple text navigation seem to work on bash shells. You can use

• alt (⌥)+D to delete a word starting from the current cursor position
• ctrl+A to jump to start of the line
• ctrl+E to jump to end of the line
• ctrl+K to kill the line starting from the cursor position
• ctrl+Y to paste text from the kill buffer
• ctrl+R to reverse search for commands you typed in the past from your history
• ctrl+S to forward search (works in zsh for me but not bash)
• ctrl+F to move forward by a char
• ctrl+B to move backward by a char
• ctrl+W to remove the word backwards from cursor position