Basic operations

To exit Emacs, press C-x C-c .

When inputing a command or shortcuts and you change your mind and want to give up, press C-g. Anytime something works strangely or gets stuck, you can always try C-g to interrupt the process.

Even cursor movement requires a shortcut? Yes, Emacs binds arrow keys to shortcuts too. This is due to the placement of the arrow keys on a keyboard is usually at the bottom right corner of a keyboard. Using them would necessitate hand movement away from the center area of the keyboard. On the other hand, moving cursor is definitely very frequent when editing. Thus, Emacs considers such interruptions to be detrimental to the workflow of editing.

The shortcuts for up , down , left, and right are C-p, C-n, C-b and C-f . The meanings are "previous", "next", "back" and "forward". It may feel strange to use these shortcuts at first, but when you get familiar with them, it could be highly efficient.

Besides the basic cursor movement, Emacs provides many other ways:

• Move by word: M-b to move back a word, M-f to move forward a word.

• Beginning and end

  • Line: C-a to move to the beginning of a line. C-e to move to the end of a line. Since many programming language has indent with spaces or tab, C-a will always move to the exact beginning of the line including white spaces, which is not often the case we want. Press M-m to move to the beginning of the line excluding the indention. The following chapter Improve the native operations will introduce a package mwim to improve this operation.
  • Sentence: M-a to move to the beginning of a sentence. M-e to move to the end of a sentence.
  • File: M-< to move to the beginning of a file. M-> to move to the end of a file. Notice that you need to press and hold Meta , Shift and comma / period at the same time.
• Window: the first time you press M-r , the cursor will move to the center of current window. Pressing it again move to the top and the pressing the third time to move the bottom.

By the way, macOS has some of these cursor movement shortcuts globally. The reader is highly recommended to practice these shortcuts and fosters muscle memory.

• Delete character: to delete a character before the cursor, press backspace as usual (which is called <DEL> or <backspace> in Emacs). To delete a character after the cursor, use C-d .
• Kill word: Press M-d to delete a word after the cursor. Press M-<DEL> to delete a word before cursor.
• Kill sentence: Press M-k to kill the sentence from current point to the end.
• Kill line: Press C-k to kill the line from current point to the end.
• Select a region: move cursor to the beginning, press C-SPC (SPC means space). A string "Mark set" will appear at the bottom of the window, which means selection start. Then move the cursor to the end of the region you want to select, same as usual. Press C-g to cancle.
• Copy: Press M-w to copy a region.
• Kill: Press C-w to kill a region.

Readers should have noticed that here we mention two operations, "Delete" and "Kill". "Delete" is delete the content completely. "Kill" is similar to "cut", which means the content will be saved to a history and could be pasted to another position, which is called "insert".

Emacs keeps a history ring that stores the content you've killed. Press C-y to paste the latest content, which is called "yank" in Emacs. To paste older history, press M-y after pressing C-y , and keep pressing M-y to scroll back. Actually this is not intuitive enough, so in the chapter Improve the native operations we will introduced a package counsel to help.

• Undo: to undo the latest operation, press C-/ or C-_ or C-x u. One execption is that directly editing text will be undone in group up to 20.
• Redo: Emacs keeps the operations history also in a ring. To redo, you need to press C-g, which means "no operation" and do the "undo", leading to a redo. It can also be seen as C-g changes the moving direction of the history ring. Readers might complain that this is very intuitive, so in chapter Improve the native operations we will introduce a package undo-tree to help.

The C-SPC command mentioned above is not only used to select a region of text. It is actually making a mark. A common practice is press C-SPC twice to make a mark without select any text. Then if we have moved the cursor to somewhere else, press C-x C-SPC or C-u C-SPC will jump directly back to where we marked. Also, package counsel will help improve the process.

To jump to a specific line, press M-g M-g and input the line number, then press enter.

Emacs provides a feature to repeat a command several times. Specificly, press C-u and input a number, then do the operation you want. For example, press C-u 12 C-n will move the cursor down by 12 lines. If no number is input, the default number is 4. This operation is actually passing a number as parameter to the C-n.

Besides, you can also press and hold Meta or C-M- and press a number to do the same thing. In GUI Emacs, you can also press and hold Ctrl and press a number.

Press C-v to scroll one page down, M-v to scroll up. Emacs will keep 3 lines not being scrolled to make it more comfortable.

Press C-l once to scroll the content and make the current position of the cursor at the center of the window. Press again to make the position of the cursor at the top of the window. Press the third time to make it to the bottom.

To search after the current position of the cursor, press C-s . A prompt "I-search: " will show at the bottom of the window. Input the text you want to search.

To find the next pattern matched, press C-s again. If you find your desired pattern, press enter to stay here. If you want to give up the searching, press C-g and it will jump back to where you've started.

To find the pattern before the current cursor, press C-r instead.

Package swiper will make things easier, which will be introduced in chapter Improve the native operations.

• Swap the character before and after the cursor: C-t. Swap the word instead: M-t. Swap the line: C-x C-t. Also there are ways to swap the sentence, paragraph and region, see the documentation for details.
• Create a new line after the current line without moving cursor: C-o. To make all continuous empty lines to one line: C-x C-o.
• Downcase the word after the cursor: M-l. Upcase the word: M-u. Captilize the word: M-c.
• Zoom in: C-x C-= . Zoom out: C-x C-- . Reset zooming: C-x C-0 .

Emacs has many ways to get help, all prefixed with C-h.

• Get a brief help message of a shortcut: C-h c and then press the shortcut. For example, press C-h c C-p and a line "C-p runs the command previous-line" will be shown at the bottom.
• Detailed documentation of a shortcut: C-h k and press the shortcut.
• Detailed documentation of a command (function): C-h f and input the command name.
• Variable information: C-h v and input the variable name.
• Command search by keyword (Command Apropos): C-h a and input a keyword to search.
• List a documentation with a keyword: C-h d and input a keyword.

So many ways to help? Press C-h ? to list the above helps.

A small package which-key can help to input shortcuts, which will be introduced in chapter Improve the native operations.