When I click this it replaces whatever I have currently typed into the buffer with a :. Hitting backspace will go back to whatever I had in the buffer but I can't seem to find what the hell it's supposed to do. It reminds me of a prompt for typing commands into.
What does meta+n do in the terminal
bash;keyboard shortcuts
It's prompting for a string to search for in your input history.From the bash readline documentationnon-incremental-forward-search-history (M-n)Search forward starting at the current line and moving down through the the history as necessary using a non-incremental search for a string supplied by the user.So if you've cycled back through your input history with up-arrow, you can use this to search forward to a line that matches a string.There's a similar M-p command that searches backwards.