Put *Everything* in vi Mode

If you're a vi user like me, try adding these two lines to your ~/.inputrc file:

set keymap vi
set editing-mode vi

Now, every program that uses the readline library for tty input (perl -d, the python REPL, psql, gdb, anything you run under rlwrap, etc.) has vi key bindings instead of the default emacs bindings.

In short, this means things like:

• 0 and $ for beginning and end of line
• k and j for navigating history forwards and backwards
• b and e for skipping words
• u for undo

See this readline vi mode cheatsheet for a longer list.

I've been using this for years with bash, where one can do set -o vi. Apparently vi mode has been present since GNU readline 2.0, released in 1994, so I really have no excuse for this one!