Cheat sheet for emacs

Hi again, time for some basic emacs tips:

Basics :

• C-x-f find file (open file)
• C-x-s save current buffer
• C-x s save buffers that have been altered
• C-x-w save as
• C-x-c quit

Help:

• C-h a cmd Get help on command
• C-h k Answers “what does this key combination do?”

Killing and yanking :

• C-k kill to end of line
• M-d kill to end of word (adding to kill ring)
• M-delete back-kill to start of word (adding to kill ring)
• C-y yank (paste)
• M-y yank previous(Do C-y M-y M-y M-y to yank third last kill)
• C-space start mark
• M-w kill from mark to here
• C-insert copy as kill from mark to here

Navigating :

• C-e goto end of current line
• C-a goto beginning of current line
• M-< goto beginning buffer
• M-> goto end of buffer
• M-x goto-line RET goes to specified line
• C-M-f goto closing brace (standing on the opening brace)
• C-M-b goto opening brace (standing on the closing brace)
• C-u C-space which takes you back to wherever you were previously working
• M-m position cursor on start of indentation

Window/Buffer commands:

• C-x 2 Split window horizontally
• C-x 3 Split window vertically
• C-x 1 Close all other windows but the one where the cursor is
• C-x 0 (Zero)Close this window, keep the other
• C-x o (oh!) Jump to next window
• C-x b View another buffer
• C-x-b Pick another buffer to view
• C-l Center buffer around line
• C-u 1 C-l Make this line the top line of the buffer

Search and replace :

• C-s incremental search forward
• C-r incremental search backward
• M-% Query replace
• C-M-% Query replace regexp
• M-x occur Find regexp in current buffer
• M-x grep-find Find regexp recursively from a directory
• M-x occur find occurences in this file, present as a list

Miscellaneous :

• C-g quit whatever command (you did something you did not intend)
• M-\ remove white space before and after cursor
• M-^ join this line with the prevoius and fix white space
• M-x delete-trailing-whitespace removes blanks after last char on all lines
• C-x C-t transpose lines, move the current line one line upwards
• M-t transpose words, swap the word behind the cursor for the one after
• M-l make the rest of this word lower case
• M-u make the rest of this word lower case
• C-x C-l make region lower case
• C-x C-u make region upper case

Keyboard Macros:

• ‘C-x (‘ to begin recording
• ‘C-x )’ to end recording
• ‘C-x e’ to execute the macro (e.g. ‘C-u 25 C-x e’ to execute the macro 25 times)

Example : incremental searching (plain or regexp) within a macro to find the next place you need to munge and then use a combination of cursor positioning, killing, yanking, copying to registers and whatnot to munge the text however necessary. Then you just ‘C-x e’ to your heart’s content.

Odd ones, that are very useful every once in a while:

• C-x r k kill rectangle
• C-x r y yank rectangle

Navigating code :

• M-. Jump to tag (where does this function reside? go there!)
• M-* Go back to where i was before jumping to tag
• M-x goto-line RET goes to specified line

To be able to use this feature you need to set up a TAGS file for your source tree. This may be done with the command ctags -e -R standing in the top level directory of your source. For more info on tags do “C-h a tag” in emacs and ctags –help in a shell.

Those are the ones that I use almost every day, apart from ediff, compiling and other things that will show up in a later post.

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