How to change previous/next word shortcut in bash?

How do I configure Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right as previous/next word shortcuts for bash (currently alt-b and alt-f)?

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Method 1

The correct answer depends on which terminal you are using.

For Gnome Terminal or recent versions of xterm, put this in ~/.inputrc:

"e[1;5C": forward-word
"e[1;5D": backward-word

For PuTTY, put this in your ~/.inputrc:

"eOC": forward-word
"eOD": backward-word

For rxvt, put this in your ~/.inputrc:

"eOc": forward-word
"eOd": backward-word

You can probably get away with putting all of those together in ~/.inputrc.

In all cases, you also need to put this in your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc):

export INPUTRC=~/.inputrc

If that doesn’t work, or you have a different terminal, go to your terminal and type Ctrl+V Ctrl+->. Then use that instead of "e[1;5C" or "eOC" above. Repeat for Ctrl+<-.

Note that you need to write the keyboard escape sequences using the inputrc syntax, e.g.

C means control
e means escape (which appears as ^[ when typing it using Ctrl+V above)

Method 2

If you’re using ZSH, you need to take a different method, because, quoting the relevant parts from ArchLinux’s ZSH guide:

Zsh does not use readline #like bash#, instead it uses its own and more powerful zle.

It does not read /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc.

After reading that guide, I figured I need a modren source of ZSH to get the general idea of how to do this from, and so I found this oh-my-zsh file which describes the behaviour I wanted,
I copied the relevant parts I wanted into my ~/.zshrc:

bindkey -e #Use emacs mode, it's more sane for beginners
bindkey '^[[1;5C' forward-word # [Ctrl-RightArrow] - move forward one word
bindkey '^[[1;5D' backward-word # [Ctrl-LeftArrow] - move backward one word
# Also, If you want to copy paste this into your zshrc,
# I'm pretty sure you would have to add this at the top : 
# setopt interactive_comments

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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