A tiny line-editing trick for Bash (or any REPL using Readline/emacs bindings)

A lot of shells (e.g. Bash) and interactive console programs (e.g. mysql, sqlite, ghci, irb) provide a line-editing interface based on Emacs bindings, either via the Readline library or similar.

These key bindings mostly take the form of ESC-<key> which is either an uncomfortable stretch or (on a full-size keyboard) takes your left hand away from the home row and slows you down. Here's a handy tip though: pressing Ctrl+[ is equivalent to hitting escape, but allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard's home row. And if you're lucky, you can hold the Alt key instead (so you can jump backwards with Alt-b and delete the next word with Alt-d — this works on Gnome Terminal for me at least, except where the key is one of the menu accelerator characters (f, e, v, s, t or h). Seriously though, until today I was hitting ESC then the desired key...