List of (Mate) Terminal escape sequences (with the actual Escape key)

This post is mostly in the hopes of catching Google searches for similar keywords, because the current results are useless due to Google’s blogspam-thirsty algorithm.

It came about because I typed Escape then star by accident, and the terminal inserted the literal filenames that would have been matched, which seems like it could be useful in some cases—for example if you want to see the files before running the command, or add/remove files to the list.

So here is the list, with its current one entry. Each item should be prefixed with Esc, so * means press Esc then asterisk.

• *: insert matching filenames. Examples:

  • git add package[Esc]* becomes git add package.json package-lock.json

  • git add [Esc]* becomes git add [all files in dir]