A nice cup of rabies

This has been a low-level annoyance to me for a while, but not one big enough to tackle the prospect of digging through cryptic UNIX documentation: is there any way to make a terminal window react to alt-cursor and shift-cursor presses the same way the entire rest of my system does?

In every other text input context on my Mac, alt-cursor jumps the text cursor a whole word. And shift-cursor moves it one notch, while selecting what it passes over. And alt-shift-cursor moves over a whole word, and selects it.

But not in a terminal window. They all just act like an unmodified cursor press.

I'm sure there must be a way to fix it. I had an alternate terminal shell that did this sort of stuff on my Amiga. But I've got no clue where to even start in terms of the docs. Anyone got starting points, or cryptic incantations to type into a terminal window?

---

Also, I just discovered a spiffy feature of Apple's terminal program: file->connect to server lets you save a little file that represents a telnet/ssh/ftp/sftp session to some server. Then installing Quicksilver's "Terminal" plugin lets you invoke these from QS: apple, apple, rd, return lets me ssh to my webserver, and knows to log in as "peganthyrus" without me having to try to remember the syntax. Much faster than navigating to ~/Library/Application Support/Terminal to click on the 'rdwarf.term' file, or starting up Terminal and doing apple-O. This may be old news to those of you who could use it, or it may not.