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We now give the basics of how to enter text, make corrections, and
save the text in a file. If this material is new to you, you might
learn it more easily by running the Emacs learn-by-doing tutorial. To
do this, type Control-h t (help-with-tutorial).
To insert printing characters into the text you are editing, just type them. This inserts the characters into the buffer at the cursor (that is, at point; see section Point). The cursor moves forward. Any characters after the cursor move forward too. If the text in the buffer is `FOOBAR', with the cursor before the `B', and you type XX, the result is `FOOXXBAR', with the cursor still before the `B'.
To delete text you have just inserted, use DEL. DEL deletes the character before the cursor (not the one that the cursor is on top of or under; that is the character after the cursor). The cursor and all characters after it move backwards. Therefore, if you type a printing character and then type DEL, they cancel out.
To end a line and start typing a new one, type RET. This inserts a newline character in the buffer. If point is in the middle of a line, RET splits the line. Typing DEL when the cursor is at the beginning of a line rubs out the newline before the line, thus joining the line with the preceding line.
Emacs automatically splits lines when they become too long, if you turn on a special mode called Auto Fill mode. See section Filling Text, for information on using Auto Fill mode.
Customization information: DEL, in most modes, runs the command
delete-backward-char; RET runs the command newline,
and self-inserting printing characters run the command
self-insert, which inserts whatever character was typed to invoke
it. Some major modes rebind DEL to other commands.
Direct insertion works for printing characters and SPC, but
other characters act as editing commands and do not insert themselves.
If you need to insert a control character or a character whose code is
above 200 octal, you must quote it by typing the character
control-q (quoted-insert) first. There are two ways to use
C-q:
A numeric argument to C-q specifies how many copies of the quoted character should be inserted (see section Numeric Arguments).
If you prefer to have text characters replace (overwrite) existing text instead of moving it to the right, you can enable Overwrite mode, a minor mode. See section Minor Modes.
To do more than insert characters, you have to know how to move point (see section Point). Here are a few of the available commands.
NOTE: Many of the following commands have two versions, one that uses the function keys (e.g. LEFT or END) and one that doesn't. The former versions may only be available on X terminals (i.e. not on TTY's), but the latter are available on all terminals.
beginning-of-line).
end-of-line).
forward-char).
backward-char).
forward-word).
backward-word).
next-line). This command attempts to keep the horizontal position unchanged, so if you start in the middle of one line, you end in the middle of the next. When on the last line of text, C-n creates a new line and moves onto it.
previous-line).
scroll-up).
scroll-down).
recenter). Text moves
on the frame to bring point to the center of the window.
move-to-window-line). Text does not move on the
frame. A numeric argument says how many screen lines down from the
top of the window (zero for the top). A negative argument counts from
the bottom (-1 for the bottom).
transpose-chars).
beginning-of-buffer). With
numeric argument n, move to n/10 of the way from the top.
See section Numeric Arguments, for more information on numeric arguments.end-of-buffer).
goto-line). Line 1 is the beginning of the buffer.
set-goal-column). Henceforth, those
commands always move to this column in each line moved into, or as
close as possible given the contents of the line. This goal column remains
in effect until canceled.
If you set the variable track-eol to a non-nil value,
C-n and C-p move to the end of the line when at the end of
the starting line. By default, track-eol is nil.
delete-backward-char).
delete-char).
kill-line).
kill-word).
backward-kill-word).
In contrast to the DEL key, which deletes the character before the cursor, Control-d deletes the character after the cursor, causing the rest of the text on the line to shift left. If Control-d is typed at the end of a line, that line and the next line are joined.
To erase a larger amount of text, use Control-k, which kills a line at a time. If you use C-k at the beginning or in the middle of a line, it kills all the text up to the end of the line. If you use C-k at the end of a line, it joins that line and the next line.
See section Deletion and Killing, for more flexible ways of killing text.
The commands above are sufficient for creating and altering text in an Emacs buffer. More advanced Emacs commands just make things easier. But to keep any text permanently you must put it in a file. Files are named units of text which are stored by the operating system and which you can retrieve by name. To look at or use the contents of a file in any way, including editing the file with Emacs, you must specify the file name.
Consider a file named `/usr/rms/foo.c'. To begin editing this file from Emacs, type:
C-x C-f /usr/rms/foo.c RET
The file name is given as an argument to the command C-x
C-f (find-file). The command uses the minibuffer to
read the argument. You have to type RET to terminate the argument
(see section The Minibuffer).
You can also use the Open... menu item from the File menu, then type the name of the file to the prompt.
Emacs obeys the command by visiting the file: it creates a
buffer, copies the contents of the file into the buffer, and then
displays the buffer for you to edit. You can make changes in the
buffer, and then save the file by typing C-x C-s
(save-buffer) or choosing Save Buffer from the File menu.
This makes the changes permanent by copying the altered contents of the
buffer back into the file `/usr/rms/foo.c'. Until then, the
changes are only inside your Emacs buffer, and the file `foo.c' is
not changed.
To create a file, visit the file with C-x C-f as if it already existed or choose Open... from the File menu and provide the name for the new file in the minibuffer. Emacs will create an empty buffer in which you can insert the text you want to put in the file. When you save the buffer with C-x C-s, or by choosing Save Buffer from the File menu, the file is created.
To learn more about using files, see section File Handling.
If you forget what a key does, you can use the Help character
(C-h) to find out: Type C-h k followed by the key you want
to know about. For example, C-h k C-n tells you what C-n
does. C-h is a prefix key; C-h k is just one of its
subcommands (the command describe-key). The other subcommands of
C-h provide different kinds of help. Type C-h three times
to get a description of all the help facilities. See section Help.
Here are special commands and techniques for entering and removing blank lines.
open-line).
delete-blank-lines).
When you want to insert a new line of text before an existing line,
you just type the new line of text, followed by RET. If you
prefer to create a blank line first and then insert the desired text,
use the key C-o (open-line), which inserts a newline after
point but leaves point in front of the newline. Then type
the text into the new line. C-o F O O has the same effect as
F O O RET, except for the final location of point.
To create several blank lines, type C-o several times, or give C-o an argument indicating how many blank lines to create. See section Numeric Arguments, for more information.
If you have many blank lines in a row and want to get rid of them, use
C-x C-o (delete-blank-lines). If point is on a blank
line which is adjacent to at least one other blank line, C-x C-o
deletes all but one of the blank lines.
If point is on a blank line with no other adjacent blank line, the
sole blank line is deleted. If point is on a non-blank
line, C-x C-o deletes any blank lines following that non-blank
line.
If you add too many characters to one line without breaking with a RET, the line grows to occupy two (or more) screen lines, with a curved arrow at the extreme right margin of all but the last line. The curved arrow indicates that the following screen line is not really a distinct line in the text, but just the continuation of a line too long to fit the frame. You can use Auto Fill mode (see section Filling Text) to have Emacs insert newlines automatically when a line gets too long.
Instead of continuation, long lines can be displayed by truncation. This means that all the characters that do not fit in the width of the frame or window do not appear at all. They remain in the buffer, temporarily invisible. Three diagonal dots in the last column (instead of the curved arrow inform you that truncation is in effect.
To turn off continuation for a particular buffer, set the
variable truncate-lines to non-nil in that buffer.
Truncation instead of continuation also happens whenever horizontal
scrolling is in use, and optionally whenever side-by-side windows are in
use (see section Multiple Windows). Altering the value of truncate-lines makes
it local to the current buffer; until that time, the default value is in
effect. The default is initially nil. See section Local Variables.
If you are accustomed to other display editors, you may be surprised that Emacs does not always display the page number or line number of point in the mode line. In Emacs, this information is only rarely needed, and a number of commands are available to compute and print it. Since text is stored in a way that makes it difficult to compute the information, it is not displayed all the time.
count-lines-region).
what-cursor-position).
There are several commands for printing line numbers:
count-lines-region) prints the number of lines in
the region (see section Selecting Text).
The command C-x = (what-cursor-position) provides
information about point and about the column the cursor is in.
It prints a line in the echo area that looks like this:
Char: x (0170) point=65986 of 563027(12%) column 44
(In fact, this is the output produced when point is before `column 44' in the example.)
The two values after `Char:' describe the character following point, first by showing it and second by giving its octal character code.
`point=' is followed by the position of point expressed as a character count. The front of the buffer counts as position 1, one character later as 2, and so on. The next, larger number is the total number of characters in the buffer. Afterward in parentheses comes the position expressed as a percentage of the total size.
`column' is followed by the horizontal position of point, in columns from the left edge of the window.
If the buffer has been narrowed, making some of the text at the beginning and the end temporarily invisible, C-x = prints additional text describing the current visible range. For example, it might say:
Char: x (0170) point=65986 of 563025(12%) <65102 - 68533> column 44
where the two extra numbers give the smallest and largest character position that point is allowed to assume. The characters between those two positions are the visible ones. See section Narrowing.
If point is at the end of the buffer (or the end of the visible part), C-x = omits any description of the character after point. The output looks like
point=563026 of 563025(100%) column 0
Any Emacs command can be given a numeric argument. Some commands
interpret the argument as a repetition count. For example, giving an
argument of ten to the key C-f (the command forward-char, move
forward one character) moves forward ten characters. With these commands,
no argument is equivalent to an argument of one. Negative arguments are
allowed. Often they tell a command to move or act backwards.
If your keyboard has a META key (labelled with a diamond on Sun-type keyboards and labelled `Alt' on some other keyboards), the easiest way to specify a numeric argument is to type digits and/or a minus sign while holding down the META key. For example,
M-5 C-n
moves down five lines. The characters Meta-1, Meta-2, and
so on, as well as Meta--, do this because they are keys bound to
commands (digit-argument and negative-argument) that are
defined to contribute to an argument for the next command.
Another way of specifying an argument is to use the C-u
(universal-argument) command followed by the digits of the argument.
With C-u, you can type the argument digits without holding
down shift keys. To type a negative argument, start with a minus sign.
Just a minus sign normally means -1. C-u works on all terminals.
C-u followed by a character which is neither a digit nor a minus sign has the special meaning of "multiply by four". It multiplies the argument for the next command by four. C-u twice multiplies it by sixteen. Thus, C-u C-u C-f moves forward sixteen characters. This is a good way to move forward "fast", since it moves about 1/5 of a line in the usual size frame. Other useful combinations are C-u C-n, C-u C-u C-n (move down a good fraction of a frame), C-u C-u C-o (make "a lot" of blank lines), and C-u C-k (kill four lines).
Some commands care only about whether there is an argument and not about
its value. For example, the command M-q (fill-paragraph) with
no argument fills text; with an argument, it justifies the text as well.
(See section Filling Text, for more information on M-q.) Just C-u is a
handy way of providing an argument for such commands.
Some commands use the value of the argument as a repeat count, but do
something peculiar when there is no argument. For example, the command
C-k (kill-line) with argument n kills n lines,
including their terminating newlines. But C-k with no argument is
special: it kills the text up to the next newline, or, if point is right at
the end of the line, it kills the newline itself. Thus, two C-k
commands with no arguments can kill a non-blank line, just like C-k
with an argument of one. (See section Deletion and Killing, for more information on
C-k.)
A few commands treat a plain C-u differently from an ordinary argument. A few others may treat an argument of just a minus sign differently from an argument of -1. These unusual cases will be described when they come up; they are always to make the individual command more convenient to use.
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