17.B: Editing

17: Emacs

17: Emacs

§ 17.A: Moving in Emacs

Unless you have a rather low-level terminal (like the kind you get from a telnet or WebTerm session) you should be able to use your mouse with emacs. Without a mouse, half the fun is gone. If your mouse is not effective, or if you care not to use it, here is a summary of movement commands available in emacs (recall that C-character means Control+character keys and that M-character means Meta+character keys simultaneously)

        C-f     Move forward a character
        C-b     Move backward a character
        
        M-f     Move forward a word
        M-b     Move backward a word

        C-n     Move to the next line 
        C-p     Move to previous line

        C-a     Move to beginning of line
        C-e     Move to end of line

        M-a     Move back to beginning of sentence
        M-e     Move forward to end of sentence

        M-v     Page up
        C-v     Page down

        M-<     Go to beginning of file
        M->     Go to end of file

Move around a little in your sample file to get a feel for these commands.

Now let's say that you want to move down 20 lines, but do not feel like typing in C-n 20 times. The C-u sequence allows you to repeat any command, any desired number of times, in this case,

> C-u 20 C-n

You should see the cursor move down 20 lines. Note that C-u can be used with any command in emacs.

Now that we have movement out of the way, let's go to Editing with emacs.

17.B: Editing

17: Emacs

17: Emacs