In Ghostty, you can configure key combinations to send arbitrary control characters. By using this feature, you can reproduce the familiar macOS behavior of deleting entire words with Option+Backspace in the terminal.
Ghostty versions prior to v1.2.0 seemed to support “Option+Backspace word deletion” without any additional configuration, but I suspect the behavior changed due to PR #7320 🤔
How to Configure
For example, add the following to your config file:
# ~/.config/ghostty/config
keybind = option+backspace=text:\x1b\x7f
Now, pressing Option+Backspace will delete the previous word in shell line editing.
(\x1b\x7f corresponds to Meta-Backspace, which is equivalent to readline’s backward-kill-word.)
Difference from Ctrl-W (unix-word-rubout)
There is also a similar configuration:
# ~/.config/ghostty/config
keybind = option+backspace=text:\x17
This sends Ctrl-W, triggering unix-word-rubout, which deletes text in units separated by whitespace.
On the other hand, \x1b\x7f also treats symbols and slashes as separators, making it convenient when editing paths or words containing hyphens.
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