> In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward

> In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while. What? I don't think you understand how terminals work! The terminal commands (on every terminal I've used for the past 20 years) are interpreted by the server. If your terminal is connected to a unix machine then generally emacs key navigation is the default. This is true for Mac OS X. Meta-F and Meta-B go forward and backward by words. Meta-delete deletes a word. C-a (and the HOME key) will go to the beginning of a line. C-e (and the END key) will go to the end. That being said there's a couple annoying (for powerusers) defaults in Terminal. I always use the "option is meta" setting so I can type Option-f when I mean M-f. Otherwise I have to type ESC-f which is harder for me. The other is that the naked HOME and END keys are by default bound to scrolling the terminal window and you have to press SHIFT-HOME and SHIFT-END to get Terminal to actually send the HOME and END character sequence through the terminal (same for page-up and page-down which are also stupidly backward). If you come from Linux and are used to using SHIFT-PAGE-UP for look at your scrollback then it can be annoying. But luckily those are easily fixed.