EMACS.DOC: A survival guide to Emacs

by Professor Heyward Ehrlich

In writing e-mail or news posting, you will need to know some basics about editing on andromeda or pegasus. For most people your editor will be a program called Emacs. If you ask for it, you will get an editor called "vi." This message will introduce you to Emacs.

Emacs is a text editor with very sophisticated functions, including multiple windows, academic formatting, user customization, and more. It produces plain text highly suitable for e-mail and news. It does not provide text attributes such as italics or underlines -- another module called a text formatter is used for that. This memo is an introduction to only the simplest functions.

Conventions:		supply anything in angle brackets
		CTRL-A or ^A	hold down CTRL and hit A
		ESC-A		hit ESC, release then hit A
		^X^C		hold down CTRL and hit X and then C
		^XI		do ^X, release, then hit I

		capitals are for legibility -- use lower case
		hit -- yes, touch the keys briskly

File management:
	
emacs myfile	brings up myfile if it exists or else creates it
^X^C		exit file -- after "y" for save or "n" for discard

Oddities:

	1. probably your text won't word wrap so use hard returns
	2. heavens knows what your DEL and Backspace keys will do
	3. stay away from PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, etc keys
	4. If you get numbers in place of arrows, hit NumLock
	5. what non-arrow keys do at Rutgers labs they won't do at home  
	6. Emacs understands sentences and paragraphs 
	7. Status lines at bottom: Emacs, filename, position, commands
	8. Emacs is also available for PC in several forms
	9. Many additional commands and customizations are possible

Moving the cursor:
	
1. Use the up, down, left, right arrow keys (see 4 above)
2. You can also use CTRL with mnemonics for forward, back,
   next, and previous to move one character or line (^F, ^B, ^N, ^P) 
3. Whatever CTRL does, ESC does more (try ESC F, ESC B, ESC N, ESC P).
   They move by words, etc.
4. You can also move to the end or alpha of your line with CTRL-E or
   CTRL-A. (Paragrahs: ESC E and ESC A.)
5.  To the top or bottom of your file: ESC <  and ESC > .   

Deleting and undeleting (cut and paste):

1. CTRL-D deletes current character.
2. ESC D deletes to end of current word.
3. CTRL-K deletes (kills) to end of line. (ESC K, end of paragraph).
4. CTRL-Y undeletes (yanks back) last multi-character delete 
5. You can also cut a whole region with CTRL-@ .... CTRL-W and then paste
   it elsewhere with CYTL-Y.

General management:

	1. CTRL-G	cancel command
	2. CTRL-L	refresh screen display
	3. CTRL-H	starts help sequence (^G cancels)
	4. CTRL-S	search forward for string	
	5. ^X^W		write to file (supply name)
	6. ^XI		insert file (supply name)
	7. ^X^S		save and continue
	8. ^XU		undo last command