At this point you should have your Emacs installed and your terminal
shortcut ready somewhere on
your desktop. Open the terminal by double-clicking on its icon, type emacs
and execute the
command by pressing Enter. You should now see the Emacs
window with an empty buffer
which is that part of the window which occupies the largest area. The
bottom part of the window
should look similarly like:
--:-- *scratch* (Lisp Interaction)--L1--All-------------------------------It means that you are now in the
scratch mode in which
you can practice typing, copying,
deleting, searching and replacing your text. I strongly recommend you
to spend some time playing
with this editor prior to reading the following section. Although Emacs
is an excellent programmer's
editor which can help you tremendously to keep your source code clear,
it requires a knowledge of
certain simple operations with your text. Emacs is not like any other
simple text editor and also
its keyboard shortcuts differ from other editors. Do not be scared when
you find that Home
jumps to the beginning of buffer, instead of to the beginning of line.
This feature can be simply
changed to emulate the behavior of other editors, but this is rather
advanced operation which we
leave for your future exploration of Emacs.
Following is the list of the most useful commands which you will
often need. Try testing each of
them in the scratch window of Emacs to make sure that you
know how they are actually
executed.
Enter - new line Tab - tabulator (the tab width is dependent on the
Emacs mode)
C-x C-f - opens a file and shows it in the current
buffer C-x C-s - saves the buffer C-x C-w - writes the buffer in a different file
(Save As) C-x C-c - quits emacs C-a - jump to the
beginning of the current line C-e - jump to the end of the current line M-f - move forward one word M-b - move backward one word M-< - move to the top of the buffer M-> - move to the bottom of the buffer M-x goto-char - read a number 
and
move to the line number . C-d - delete the
character at the cursor C-k - kill (delete) the text from the position of
cursor to the end of the current line M-d - kill (delete) forward until the end of the
next word M-Del - kill (delete) backward until the beginning
of a previous word C-s - search forward (searching
towards the end of
the current buffer) C-r - search backward (searching towards the top of
the current buffer) M-% - replace forward C-SPC - mark beginning
of the text for
copying/moving/deleting C-w - cut the text from buffer to the clipboard C-y - yank (paste) the text from the clipboard at
the position of the cursor C-_ - undo the last change ESC ESC ESC - cancel the last operation (try it
after C-x C-w)
Once you finish writing your scratch text, you can try saving it by
executing C-x C-s. The
minibuffer at the bottom of your screen now asks for the file
name, File to save in:.
To replace an existing file, you can always press Tab
during writing the file name and Emacs
automatically adds the rest of the name, provided that it can be
uniquely identified. Pressing
Tab once more opens a new buffer which shows you the
directory structure and allows you to
find the target directory manually by clicking on folders.