8 Basic Editing Commands

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 use the tutorial, run Emacs and type Control-h t (help-with-tutorial).

To clear the screen and redisplay, type C-l (recenter).

• Inserting Text: Inserting text by simply typing it.
• Moving Point: How to move the cursor to the place where you want to change something.
• Erasing: Deleting and killing text.
• Undo: Undoing recent changes in the text.
• Files: Visiting, creating, and saving files.
• Help: Asking what a character does.
• Blank Lines: Commands to make or delete blank lines.
• Continuation Lines: Lines too wide for the screen.
• Position Info: What page, line, row, or column is point on?
• Arguments: Numeric arguments for repeating a command.
• Repeating: A short-cut for repeating the previous command.