In penance for cracking stupid jokes on Twitter, here's my Emacs cheat sheet. Emacs has a steep learning curve, so I've tried to order them by importance so you could learn them in stages.
One overall rule of thumb: pay attention to the minibuffer (the line at the bottom of the editor). It will often guide you through a process, and also gives you hints about what state you're in, such as the middle of a multi-chord sequence.
The other rule of thumb: when in doubt, C-g it out.
You simply can't get by without having these at your fingertips.
- C-x C-c - quit
- C-x C-s - save buffer
- C-x C-f - open file
- C-x b buffer name - switch to open buffer
- C-g - cancel
- C-x k - close current buffer
- C-h a command name - look up docs for command
- M-x command name - execute command
- C-x u - undo
- C-/ - undo
-
C-a - beginning of line
-
C-e - end of line
-
C-f - forward character
-
C-b - backward character
-
C-p - down a line
-
C-n - up a line
-
M-f - forward word
-
M-b - backward word
-
S-any of the above - navigate and select
-
C-space - start selection
- C-w - cut
- C-y - paste
- C-s - search
- M-% - search and replace
- C-d - delete character ahead
- M-d - delete word ahead
- backspace - delete character behind
- M-backspace - delete word behind
- C-k - cut from cursor to end of line
- C-o - insert newline after cursor
- C-x 2 - split window horizontally
- C-x 3 - split window vertically
- C-x 1 - unsplit window
- C-x o - switch to other pane in split window
- M-q - auto-hard-wrap current paragraph
- C-t - swap the two characters at the cursor
- M-u - uppercase the word at the cursor
- M-l - lowercase the word at the cursor
- C-u n char - insert n copies of char
- M-x replace-regexp - search and replace by regexp (the quoting/escaping is so weird that this always takes me several tries)
- C-r t - "string-rectangle" (this one's really weird but super useful sometimes; look up the docs)