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emacs

emacs (for the purposes of this introduction we will be using the lightweight mg micro version of emacs. To install the editor run the following commands:

sudo apt -y install mg

emacs windows

Running mg creates a window on our screen containing:

  • Text window showing the contents of the buffer
  • A one-line mode line describing what is going on in the text window
  • A minibuffer -- a special location to input commands

escape and control keys

mg relies heavily on the escape key and the control key. Throughout this section, <esc> means to type the escape key and <cntl>. For example.

<esc> a

<cntl>-a

Means type the escape key and then the a key, which is sometimes referred to as an escape sequence and the second one is hold down the control key and then press the a key while holding the control key. This is known as a control character. If you don't do this the text is inserted into the buffer.

Character Operations

The character operations are:

  • cntl-b : Move back one character
  • cntl-f : Move forward one character
  • cntl-p : Move to the previous line
  • cntl-n : Move to the next line
  • cntl-d : Delete the character underneath the cursor
  • delete : Delete the charater to the left of the cursor
  • cntl-t : Transpose the two previous characters.

file operations

The file operations are:

  • cntl-x cntl-v : Visit a file -- putting the contents of a file into the buffer
  • cntl-x cntl-w : Write the contents of the buffer to a file
  • cntl-x cntl-s : Write the contents of the buffer to the file listed in the mode line

To exit mg, use the following control sequence:

`cntl-x cntl-c`

line operations

Line operations work with an entire line of the buffer. The four line operations are:

  • cntl-a : Move the cursor to the beginning of the line
  • cntl-e : Move the cursor to the end of the line
  • cntl-o : Insert a blank line into the buffer
  • cntl-k : Kill a line of text

word operations

Word operations work with an entire word of text at one time instead of just one character at a time.

  • <esc>b : Move back one word
  • <esc>f : Move forward one word
  • <esc><delete> : Delete one word to the left
  • <esc>d : Delete one word to the right
  • <esc>t : Transpose the two words around the cursor
  • <ecs>c : Capitalize a word. Must be at the beginning of a word for this to work consistently
  • <esc>u : Convert a word to uppercase
  • <esc>l : Convert a word to lowercase

This practice is a minimal introduction to how to use emacs. Using your preferred search engine explore the use of emacs if this has scratched a surface. How to get comfortable with emacs would be a workshop in itself.