^W

Ctrl-W, the key sequence used to delete a word at a time in many UNIX environments. Strangely enough, tcsh just makes this a euphemism for ^U, and many programs don't even bother to implement it. Too bad, since it's really useful. At least tinyfugue uses it, and some people grok its meaning.

Mostly, it's useful for showing "accidental" long sections of text which need to be deleted without having a buttload of ^Hs.

A lot of fucking idiots^W^WWindows l^Husers could do to fuck off and die^W^W^W^Wlearn more about UNIX.

In fact, tcsh binds ^W to a different action (kill-region) than it does ^U (kill-whole-line). The binding is stolen from (X)Emacs. To use it, first set the "mark" somewhere in the line of text (hit C-space (^space) or C-@ (^@)), then go somewhere else and kill the region with C-w. Now you can use "yank", bound to C-y (^Y) to insert what you deleted.

When you start editing a line, mark is at the beginning of the line, which explains the behaviour Magenta complains about.