Enable Ctrl (or Alt) + arrow keys to mimic 'home' and 'end' functionality

Question

I am a long time Mac user and I'm now using a Ubuntu machine for development, and while I'm more or less used to a lot of the keyboard shortcuts, one thing I can't get used to is using the 'Home' and 'End' keys to move around lines of text. On a Mac you use "Command + right arrow" to go to the end of a line and "Command + left arrow" to go to the beginning.

Is there a way to enable this kind of functionality in Linux?

I'm not sure if this would be considered remapping, keyboard shortcuts, or what...

Answer 1

Using xmodmap (some hints) you can rebind keys for the whole window system. The following approach will deliver what you want, but with side effects :(

Try it out in a terminal window first:

1. Let the left Alt key be the so called Mode_switch:

   1. Assign the key the Mode_switch key sym:

      xmodmap -e 'keycode  64 = Mode_switch Meta_L Alt_L Meta_L'
      

   2. (Normally: Make sure that Mode_switch is assigned to one of the mod1-5 modifier keys, but this is already the case in Ubuntu)

2. Modify the third row of the Left and Right keys

   xmodmap -e 'keycode 113 = Left NoSymbol Home'
   xmodmap -e 'keycode 114 = Right NoSymbol End'
   

As is the changes are kept until you log out. If you wish to keep it permanently put the following into a file ~/.Xmodmap:

keycode  64 = Mode_switch Meta_L Alt_L Meta_L
keycode 113 = Left NoSymbol Home
keycode 114 = Right NoSymbol End

However be warned that this overrides the normal function of your Alt key (accessing menu, Alt-Tab etc.) :(

I am not an expert in xmodmap & Co, though. Maybe someone else knows how to fix this. I really like Ubuntu and Linux in general, but this whole keyboard stuff is unnecessarily complicated and sorrowly broken :-<

Answer 2

This is specifically for sublime text, but for anyone searching for a way to remap alt and the arrow keys to behave like on a mac might stumble across this answer like I have. In sublime, open Preferences > Key Bindings - User and add the following between the square brackets.

{ "keys": ["alt+left"], "command": "move_to", "args": {"to": "bol", "extend": false} },
{ "keys": ["alt+right"], "command": "move_to", "args": {"to": "eol", "extend": false} }

now, at least you have a useful text editor with proper behaving alt + left and right arrows! Hope this helped a little bit.

Answer 3

For programs that use readline (e.g. bash) you can edit ~/.inputrc to bind beginning-of-line and end-of-line to the appropriate sequence. GUI widget toolkits have their own bindings, and you'll have to find the appropriate bits and pieces for them, assuming it's possible at all (GTK+ 2.x).