How to Move Regions of Text (Cut & Paste)
The following emacs commands will allow you to move around regions of
text without the use of a mouse.
- Ctrl-<space> or Ctrl-@
- Either of these commands will set a mark. A mark is an an
invisible pointer which will be used to mark the starting character of
the region you wish to delete or move. If you place the mark in the
wrong place, you can set it elsewhere with the same command.
- Ctrl-w
- This command will kill all of the text between the mark location
and the current emacs cursor position. This text can be retrieved with
the following command unless you kill another block of text.
- Meta-w
- This command will save all of the text between the mark
location and the current emacs cursor position; it can then be
retrieved with the following command unless you kill/save another
block of text.
- Ctrl-y
- This command will yank back the text which was deleted most
recently with the above command. The text will be placed at the
current emacs cursor location. You can yank back the text as many
times as you wish.
- Meta-y
- When you kill or copy a region of text, it doesn't forget about
previous kills. Instead, it keeps track of them in a stack
fashion. If you want to yank the region you killed before the last
one, hit Ctrl-y to yank, and then Meta-y to yank the previous kill
instead of the one you just retrieved. You can keep hitting
Meta-y as many times as you like, if you want to
recover something killed a while back. The maximum number of kills
remembered at any given time defaults to 30.
- Ctrl-x u
- This is the undo command. This is useful if you yank back text at
the wrong location or sometimes if you delete something you didn't
mean to. Each time you repeat this command, emacs will undo a previous
change to your file.