Useful emacs commands

Note that below

• a hyphen, e.g. ctrl-a means that you keep ctrl pressed while hitting a, and
• a space, e.g. esc x means that you press esc, release it and then press x.

Start emacs with

emacs -Q file.txt

and you will not have to experinece the annoying split-screen view.

1) Useful keyboard commands.

2) Removing rectangle areas from the text:

• Go to the upper left corner of the area you want to remove and press esc spacebar.
• Go to the lower right corner of the area you want to remove and press ctlr - x r k

3) Using emacs macros :

You can teach emacs a keyboard sequence and easily repeat that sequence as many times as you wish.

• Start recording by ctrl-x (
• type whatever sequence you want to record and
• stop recording by ctrl-x ).

The recorded keyboard sequence can be replayed by ctrl-e.

If you want to repeat it many times just pressing e after the first ctrl-e is enough.