The terminal model is just to display the text that the currently running software provides and send input to it. It’s not a text editor. The prompt is a featur

The terminal model is just to display the text that the currently running software provides and send input to it. It’s not a text editor. The prompt is a feature of the shell and other REPL programs, not the terminal. Bash and Zsh and others use readline which allows text editing like navigation [0]. And there’s rlwrap for programs that lack these. [0]: https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html