You're probably thinking of readline[1] actually. At the least that's why bash supports emacs keybindings (though I am never sure if a feature is from the shell

You're probably thinking of readline[1] actually. At the least that's why bash supports emacs keybindings (though I am never sure if a feature is from the shell or the terminal emulator). I believe you can configure readline to have vim keybindings. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline