#EMACS SHORTCUTS HOW TO#
#EMACS SHORTCUTS PDF#

The Emacs documentation uses a standard to communicate keyboard shortcuts. However, after using Emacs only for a little while, your muscle memory kicks in, and you’ll be playing your computer like a piano. It might seem daunting to learn a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Understanding the basic principles of major and minor modes will be necessary when we delve into using packages in the other articles. This is a What you See is What You Mean approach, which this article explains in more detail.

#EMACS SHORTCUTS PDF#

However, the way the text looks on the screen is not how it will look when you print it or export it to a PDF of another format. The different colours and font types help you to find your way around the text. For example, in Org mode, each level of heading has a different colour (depending on your theme). While each bufer can have only one major mode, a buffer can have one or more active minor modes.Įach mode can also define how a buffer displays text. A minor mode is an auxiliarry program that provides additional functionality. A major mode is almost like opening another program, but within the Emacs environment.Įmacs will automatically select the relevant major mode using the file extension, just like most modern operating systems, and displays it in the mode line below each buffer.Ī minor mode provides additional functionality, such as spell checking, auto-completion or displaying line numbers.

#EMACS SHORTCUTS HOW TO#

The articles on this website mainly describe how to use Org mode to accomplish tasks. Each mode has its own functionality and key bindings. Major modes can be Org mode, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX and so on. Every buffer has one major mode and can have one or more minor modes.Ī major mode determines the main functionality. The next article shows how to configure Emacs to remove these visual distractions.Įmacs can accomplish different tasks through the use of major and minor modes. You can fully control Emacs with the keyboard through an elaborate system of keyboard shortcuts and by directly activating functions. You regularly need to move one hand away from the keyboard. Using a mouse to issue instructions to a text editor is inefficient when writing text. Most users ignore this ’convenience’ and rely on keyboard-driven instructions. Emacs does not save the content of the scratch buffer, so don’t start writing your dissertation just yet.Įmacs has a mouse-driven menu system, with menus on the top of the screen and so on. When the splash screen closes, you’ll see the ’scratch buffer’, which you can use for temporary notes. Pressing q is the standard method to kill read-only screens in Emacs. Click on the links to read the tutorial, or press the q button to remove the screen and keep reading this article. When you first start Emacs, you see a splash screen with some links to help files. Now that you have cleared the first hurdle, it is time to open Emacs and look around.

Emacs shortcuts