2- User Input & Text Navigation (Emacs Survival Guide)

Standard alphanumeric keys (a–z, numbers, punctuation). These will most of the time be inserted directly into the focused buffer. Only in some special major modes (like Dired which will be explained later), the standard keys may actually trigger commands instead of inserting characters.

A key chord is when you press a normal character while holding down one or more modifier keys. The below table shows the modifier key symbol in addition to its keyboard key and Emacs. It's very similar to modern keyboard keys except for Meta, which refers to Alt (typical keyboards), or Option (Mac keyboards).

These symbols are combined with dashes to form key chords. The table below shows some key chords and how they are described in modern keyboard:

A Key Sequence is a combination of key chords or normal characters pressed in order. We call the first key in this sequence prefix key, the keys or chords that follow it are separated by space. The table below shows examples of key sequences and how they are represented in modern keyboards.

I strongly recommend that you fire up Emacs and press M-x at this point. This guide will only be useful if you practice what you learn. You should see something like the screenshot below. If so, congrats! You're looking at the minibuffer.

From here, you can find a command using fuzzy searching, if you start typing space separated keywords (like prev line), the list will filter down to show you the command you're looking for. Next to each command, the minibuffer displays its keybinding and a brief description as well. This is the best way to recall a keybinding when you forget it. If you know that a command exists and remember part of its name, you can find it via M-x (execute-extended-command).

C-g (keyboard-quit) is the universal escape keybinding. It aborts incomplete key sequences and active prompts. Try out pressing C-g (keyboard-quit) after pressing M-x (execute-extended-command), you should notice that the minibuffer will be closed.

Note: Throughout this guide, I use the format key (command-name) to show both the keybinding and its associated Emacs command. For example, C-g (keyboard-quit) means pressing C-g executes the keyboard-quit command.

You now know the two essential commands I want you to remember along with their keybindings. I won't ask you for now to remember any more keybindings or commands, I just want you to know that they exist and notice their command name pattern.

If text looks smaller or larger than what you expect on your screen, these commands help you scale it up or down.

Note: As mentioned earlier, there's no need to memorize keybindings. Notice the pattern in the function/command names of font scaling, they all begin with text-scale. You can run them directly by name via M-x. When you type text scale in your M-x, you will see these commands along with their keybindings to refresh your memory. Over time, muscle memory will take over and you won't need M-x as often.

You may want to execute a command C-n (next-line) 10 times, which will take go to 10 line below. In such cases, it will be inefficient to press the chord 10 times. You can instead use C-u (universal-argument) to repeat the execution of a command. Try pressing C-u 10 C-n, this means you want to repeat the command C-n (next-line) 10 times, you can replace 10 with any number and C-n with any other command.

Emacs has two concepts in deletion of text:

• Deletion: Discards text without saving it (Delete).
• Killing: Discards text and saves it into the Kill Ring (Cut).

Whenever you see a command that says kill, then it will cut the text and store it into the kill ring. If the command says delete, then it will delete the text without storing it anywhere.

In Emacs terminology, pasting is called Yanking. Another key concept to learn before proceeding is Region: the currently highlighted or selected text in a buffer. You can click and drag in Emacs with your mouse to select text like you do in any other application such as your web browser. However, the Emacs way is to press C-SPC (set-mark-command). This sets a marker at your cursor, moving anywhere with Emacs navigation keys and commands will then expand the highlighted region. We’ll discuss other methodologies to select text in later articles.

In Emacs, the cursor position is called the Point. When you press C-SPC (set-mark-command), you store current Point position into the Mark. The area between your Point and Mark is the active Region.

Note: Don't forget your panic button, C-g (keyboard-quit)! It can be used to cancel the selection/active region.

Emacs offers powerful ways to navigate and revert edit history, for the sake of simplicity, your setup is configured to follow conventional undo and redo behavior.

Note: Leaving the keybinding empty for revert-buffer isn't a typo! Emacs comes with thousands of built-in commands and that number grows as you install packages and write your own functions. Only a fraction of commands are bound to keys. Later, you'll learn how to assign custom keybindings to your most frequently used commands. In the meantime, any unbound command can be run anytime via M-x (execute-extended-command).