Emacs/readline bindings for Delete Word. Open up a bash shell, type in `foo bar baz`, then press ctrl-W twice.

'^W' is what would appear instead if you weren't in a readline/emacs editor, but instead a dumb line terminal. Thus, leaving '^W' behind makes it look like you didn't realize what you just corrected is still visible.

It's a joke. I've now explained and ruined it.

Slashdot posters would use ^H^H in their posts (backspace)

It goes back way further than that - probably to the dawn of IRC or so.

I believe it dates back to the unix talk(1) program, quite a bit earlier than IRC.

It’s from the dec terminal emulation, VT100. I think specifically when you connected to like an ansi type system with dec mode. Or something like that, the memories are fuzzy

The keystroke certainly does, but I was talking about people inserting ^h and ^w in the middle of conversations, which is a bit harder to nail down, though the practice is older than the parent thought.

^H was backspace on teletypes, which probably dates back to the 1960's.

Ah okay makes sense! It's amazing the gaps in knowledge I still have with a lot of things.

I've used Linux daily for like 15 years now, and I know about control characters, but since I never really used emacs (or readline beyond the copy+pasted command here or there) I just completely missed the meaning.

Not emacs (it means kill-region there, which deletes the text between the cursor and the mark and saves it in a holding area, fairly close to what windows does when you hit ^x, except the holding area is fancier).

This readline behavior follows a Unix tty driver. I'm not sure off the top of my head which one introduced it. I don't think it was on xenix but am pretty sure some 4.x bsd had it.

In days of yore the joke was always ^H^H after IBM/DEC backspace v delete confusion

"^W" is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-Transmission-Block_char...

In Unix line editors it is traditionally used to mean 'erase the previous word'.

See also documentation for ASCII (http://www.robelle.com/smugbook/ascii.html for example) for origins of ^C, ^D, ^S, etc.

As an HP3000 programmer I still refer to this link fairly often. Ah MPE, its a strange one.

It’s used the same way strikethrough is used, for reasons others have explained.

^W deletes the last word in readline.

In readline in emacs mode (yes you can switch deadline in vi mode)

Delete word.