Fish shell's new alt backspace behavior and how to revert it

In fish shell, typing alt-Backspace when you have the characters “red-fox” in your terminal would remove the word “fox”, leaving only the characters “red-”.

This has been the default behavior on Linux for years and is consistent with how alt-Backspace works in Emacs, but recently, the default behavior has changed. Instead of deleting only “fox”, fish shell deletes the whole string “red-fox”.

To revert to the old behavior, edit your config.fish file and add the following line:

bind alt-backspace backward-kill-word

And then you no longer have to retrain your muscle memory.

See this github issue where the devs of fish shell explains the reason behind the change and more customization operations regarding the keybindings: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/10926