Something I've always wondered though - did emacs take them from readline or did readline take them from emacs? How old is readline? Where did all of those C-a, C-e, etc conventions come from?
They came from emacs. Readline is now around v6, readline v2 seems to have been from the mid 1990s.
There is a smaller set of standard commands for killing (C-h for char, C-w for word, C-u for line) which are used in many terminal apps. They are orthogonal to emacs, and probably about as old (1970s).
Those emacs style editing commands actually came from TECO in the 70s. Crazy that those editing commands are hardwired into my brain nearly 40 years later.
