OS : RHEL / Oracle Linux 6.8

In bash shell, how can I replace a character under the cursor with another character ?

In the below example , after I typed the following line, I realized that I meant 7018 and not 2018. So I move the cursor to the left and keep it on top of 2 (of 2018) and I want to replace 2 with 7. How can I do that ?

$ echo hello 2018

This question is not about replacing characters in a text file using vi/vim/emacs editors.

A video example (for more clarity)
In the below video, how is this guy changing 2010 to 2011 instantly ? He also changes 2011 to 2012 , ... etc

https://youtu.be/ch5g_veylAM?t=361

Attached Thumbnails

 

There is at least one way to do this :
$ set -o vi

$ echo hello 2018 (move cursor aver 2, type 'r' then'7'

But the VI mode is not "friendly" for a lot of people and change lot of things.

1 members found this post helpful.

Personally I go to the point just after the character, hit BACKSPACE to delete that character, and then type in my correction.


Meanwhile there is such as thing as insert mode which is natively on, in my terminal. Appears not to be in that video.

1 members found this post helpful.

this is on macos, and while macos uses (its own version of) bash, it could also be a different shell.
it could be a function of that different shell, or a function of macos' terminal app, or one of the solutions proposed earlier.

there's also this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/6410...overwrite-mode

1 members found this post helpful.

Didn't really view that video in great enough detail. It is a good point, ondoho.

Meanwhile the behavior of overwrite is typically controlled by the INSERT key on my keyboard.

My default is that if I migrated back to part of my command and type something, it'll insert the new character, hence my description of what I normally do.

If I hit the INSERT key once, it now changes the mode to be overstrike, or overwrite and I see the exact same behavior from that video.

I've never preferred that mode. It doesn't work on all types of system terminals. But that's also what I meant when I used that term in my last post.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yeah, in my experience, this nearly always works ie it's the default 'setting' unless someone has customised the login files and set it to OVERSTRIKE mode instead, but that is rare and easy to fix.

On my console, DEL followed by 7 would do that. Does that not work for you?