If you feel, not unreasonably, that both Vim and Emacs’ keyboard command systems are bizarre and arcane, you can customize Readline’s key bindings and make them whatever you like. This is not hard to do. Readline reads a ~/.inputrc file on startup that can be used to configure various options and key bindings. One thing I’ve done is reconfigured Ctrl-K. Normally it deletes from the cursor to the end of the line, but I rarely do that. So I’ve instead bound it so that pressing Ctrl-K deletes the whole line, regardless of where the cursor is. I’ve done that by adding the following to ~/.inputrc: