8. Basic Editing Commands

Here we explain the basics of how to enter text, make corrections, and save the text in a file. If this material is new to you, we suggest you first run the Emacs learn-by-doing tutorial, by typing Control-h t inside Emacs. (help-with-tutorial).

To clear and redisplay the screen, type C-l (recenter).

8.1 Inserting Text		Inserting text by simply typing it.
8.2 Changing the Location of Point		Moving the cursor to the place where you want to change something.
8.3 Erasing Text		Deleting and killing text.
8.4 Undoing Changes		Undoing recent changes in the text.
8.5 Files		Visiting, creating, and saving files.
8.6 Help		Asking what a character does.
8.7 Blank Lines		Making and deleting blank lines.
8.8 Continuation Lines		How Emacs displays lines too wide for the screen.
8.9 Cursor Position Information		What page, line, row, or column is point on?
8.10 Numeric Arguments		Numeric arguments for repeating a command N times.
8.11 Repeating a Command		Repeating the previous command quickly.