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Essential Emacs Cheat Sheet by

All the other Emacs cheat sheets are too exhaustive and cumbersome. This is for people who just need to get in, make a few edits, and get out. This is not intended to be a guide for the power user or developers.

emacs OSX basics

Emacs Key
Name
OSX
M
Meta
Alt - ⌥
C
Control
Ctrl
s
Special
Command - ⌘
S
Shift
Shift
Quick reference on reading emacs keys.
eg: C-M-x = Ctrl + ⌥ + x in OSX. C-s s = Ctrl + s, s

File Commands

C-x C-f
Open file
C-x C-s
Save file
C-x C-b
Show buffer list
 

Cursor Commands

C-s
Search forward
C-r
Search backward
C-v
Scroll down
M-v
Scroll up

Copy/Paste Commands

C-w
Cut
M-w
Copy
C-y
Yank (Paste)
C-k
Delete from cursor to line ending
M-k
Delete sentence
 

Additional Essentials

ESC ESC ESC
Back out of any command
C-g
Stop current command (immed­iately)
C-x C-c
Close Emacs
C-z
Put Emacs in background mode
fg
(from command line) return Emacs to foreground mode
       
 

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