Basic Emacs Commands


Development of the first Emacs, a text editor, began in the mid-1970s and continues actively as of today. Emacs has over 2,000 built-in commands and allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Emacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. The features of Emacs include: For more Emacs commands, refer to the Emacs reference card, where C: holding the control key and M: holding the Alt key.

Command Description
C-h (or F1) Help
C-x 1 Remove help window.
C-x C-s Save a file back to disk.
C-x C-c Exit Emacs permanently.
C-x i Insert contents of another file into this buffer.
C-k Delete a line.
C-x u Undo an unwanted change.
M-x revert-buffer Restore a buffer to its original contents.
M-% Interactively replace a text string.
RET Exit query-replace.
C-s Search forward.
C-M-s Regular expression search




      I bought a ring, and I’m ready to    
      pop the question (propose marriage) to Sophia