Hour 4: Basic Editing: Q&A

Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours

Hour 4: Basic Editing

Sections in this Hour:
Inserting and Deleting Text	Editing a File	Summary
Moving Around in the Buffer	Miscellaneous File Commands	Q&A
Cut, Copy, and Paste	Document Templates	Exercises

Q&A

: Q Why is C-a used to go the beginning of the line and not C-b?
: A C-b moves the cursor one position to the left or, in other words, backward. Emacs was developed long before the cursor became common. Therefore a keybinding was necessary. Unfortunately the word backward has the same initial letter as beginning of line .
: Q Why are the commands for deleting text called kill- something, rather than delete- something (for example, kill-region)?
: A In Emacs, the deleting commands are grouped in two categories: One (kill-ring) copies the deleted text to the clipboard, whereas the other removes the text. The commands that copy the text to the clipboard are called kill- something, whereas the others are called delete- something.
: Q Why isn't jka-compr enabled by default? Is there something about it that might make Emacs more unstable?
: A No; jka-compr isn't enabled by default only because it needs to define functions to be enabled at Emacs's start-up time, which takes time. The discussion about why this is necessary is too technical to include here but, believe me, if you have one extra second each time you start Emacs and you often edit compressed files, you should really load it in your .emacs file.

Sams Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours

Contents Index

Hour 4: Basic Editing

Sections in this Hour:
Inserting and Deleting Text	Editing a File	Summary
Moving Around in the Buffer	Miscellaneous File Commands	Q&A
Cut, Copy, and Paste	Document Templates	Exercises