catalinakeyboardterminal
I'm on Mac OSX Catalina (10.15.3) and find that while I can use the emacs keybindings CTRLe and CTRLa to move to the end and beginning of a line respectively, I cannot use those command in combination with the SHIFT key.
My expectation would be that it would move the caret to the end/beginning of the line while selecting characters.
In other related answers I see the suggestion to move to iTerm2. However, I would like to minimise the number of "duplicate" applications on my mac.
Drop the '\[' and '\]'. They mean "the enclosed stuff doesn't take up display space", and are messing up the count, as you suspected. They are usually used to enclose strings that set the following text color, f/ex. Without them, the prompt - and emacs editing - will work correctly.
Here's a handy prompt-syntax reference card.
KeyMap4MacBook can actually do this. As I told in the question, the problem is Windows and Mac OSX interpret Home and End differently. So what I needed was an app that allowed me to have different mappings for different apps (Windows is in VM Ware or Parallels, which are apps)
KeyMap4MacBook allows to have different key mappings for the Mac and different ones for VMs / Remote Desktops:
Best Answer
Press ⌃ ⇧ 2 to start "marking text".