Basic Emacs Commands

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Development of the first Emacs, a text editor, began in the mid-1970s and continues actively as of today. Emacs has over 2,000 built-in commands and allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Emacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. The features of Emacs include:

• Content-sensitive editing modes, including syntax coloring, for a variety of file types including plain text, source code, and HTML,
• Built-in documentation, including a tutorial for new users,
• Unicode support for nearly all human languages and their scripts,
• Customizable, using Emacs Lisp code or a graphical interface, and
• Various extensions that add other functionality, including a project planner, mail and news reader, debugger interface, calendar, and more.

For more Emacs commands, refer to the Emacs reference card, where C: holding the control key and M: holding the Alt key.

Command	Description
C-h (or F1)	Help
C-x 1	Remove help window.
C-x C-s	Save a file back to disk.
C-x C-c	Exit Emacs permanently.
C-x i	Insert contents of another file into this buffer.
C-k	Delete a line.
C-x u	Undo an unwanted change.
M-x revert-buffer	Restore a buffer to its original contents.
M-%	Interactively replace a text string.
RET	Exit query-replace.
C-s	Search forward.
C-M-s	Regular expression search