Ctrl+Backspace should delete the rest of the word left of the cursor in Insert mode

[jroth5]

Ctrl+Backspace is a pretty common shortcut and it would be nice for it to work in insert mode. It deletes everything from the left of the cursor to the start of the current word, placing the cursor where the last character used to be. Currently, ctrl+backspace does nothing.

[CptPotato]

Alt Backspace works like this.

I think this is common on Linux (Ctrl Backspace is usually found on Windows).

[jroth5]

Ahh, never knew that.

I tried adding this to my config:
[keys.insert]
C-backspace = "delete-word-backward"

but it gets ignored (doing a normal backspace instead). Anyone know why that is? Is there some other way to remap it?

[kirawi]

Might be eaten by your terminal. You can try Wezterm which supports the extended keyboard protocol.

[the-mikedavis]

Yeah I believe that's the case: C-backspace sends the same escape codes as C-h. In order to bind this you need a terminal that supports and enables the enhanced keyboard protocol: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Terminal-Support#enhanced-keyboard-protocol

[kobakt]

I just found out that both of these commands already work in command mode and in the file picker (on windows), but not in insert mode. It was a little confusing when they didn't work when I thought I had already been using them.

While it's not hard to add these as keybinds, for consistency's sake maybe they should just be added as extra defaults.

[KySpace]

Is there a command to delete till next word's beginning? Now I bind the C-del to delete_word_forward but that doesn't quite behave like usual typing. For example I have a lot of white space after the cursor until the next word, and I want to delete those, currently this will delete the next word as well, while I just want to remove the next space.