basic emacs commands - emacs is a text editor linux uses

Every new Emacs user should run the Emacs tutorial. To start Emacs, you can specify a file on the command line or not as you wish for the tutorial:

        emacs

or

        emacs file_name

Emacs allows you to edit several files at one time, and to view them each in its own window. Each file is read into a buffer. You make modifications to the buffer. The buffer is periodically saved, and when you issue the save-buffer (XS) command, the buffer is written to a file with the buffer's name. Your old file is renamed with a   or a backup version number at the file name end. (This is a user settable option).

To start the tutorial, issue the command C-h C-t (press and hold control, then press h, then press and hold control, then press t) to run the tutorial. Experiment with it. Don't worry about messing up the tutorial for anyone else, as you are editing a copy that will wind up in your directory if you save it. The tutorial discusses cursor ting files, deleting, saving to a 'kill buffer' and yanking (inserting) from the 'kill buffer' etc.

Once you have learned this you can read the 'info' system to get all the rest of the information available about Emacs.

The general syntax of the info command is, at the command prompt,

        info

which displays all the topics about which information is available. Anything available on the Linux systems is likely to be in the info system.

AFTER you have run the tutorial this minimal list of Emacs commands will help you:

  ^X^C get out of emacs
  ^G   stop a command that seems to have run away

  ^@ set mark
  ^A move cursor to the beginning of the current line
  ^D delete the character under the cursor
  ^E move cursor to the end of the current line
  ^H help press again for more detail
  ^K kill from cursor to end of line (ie put in a buffer for
     possible retrieval with yank command)
  ^V page down
  ^Y yank text from kill buffer

  ^X^F find a file and load it into a buffer -if the named file
       exists otherwise create a file with that name

  ^Xb  change buffer
  ^X^b list buffers

  M-v page up (M = Meta, on our systems this is the escape key)
  M-< move cursor to start of buffer
  M-> move cursor to end of buffer