Will not work correctly if you are running Emacs within an xterm Otherwise, you will have to use the keyboard commandsįor pasting text, as described above. Your mouse, try clicking both the left and right buttons To paste this text, move the cursor to or click the mouseĪt the location in which you wish to paste this text, and single-click In the X Window System, the text is automatically copied when it is The area you selected should be highlighted. The start of the area to be selected, and drag the mouse to the end of the 'xterm' window) as part of an X Window session, you can select If you are running Emacs in its own window (and not within an (Usually several thousands ofĬharacters worth of changes are stored and available for being undone.) Using the mouse in the X Window System Which you can activate in one of three ways: pressing C-_ To undo a given action, you can use the undo command, M-y multiple times to cycle backwards through all of your Replaced by an earlier section of text you selected. This will default to running Emacs in a GUI, but it can also be run within the shell (emacs -nw). Immediately after having pasted with C-y, press Open an existing file by entering emacs in the shell followed by the name of the file. You can paste earlier sections of cut or copied text. However,Įverything you have cut or copied is stored in the kill ring (which isĪnalogous to a clipboard), and can be retrieved when you paste. Pasted is the very last thing that you cut or copied. If you wish to cut or paste a rectangular area of text, rather thanĪ continuous area that wraps from margin to margin, see ARCHIVED: How do I use Emacs to cut and paste a rectangular region (columnsīy default, when you paste into the buffer, what gets

The key can be typed by itself (because it really is a character) and then followed by another character the key must be held down while the next. For a listing of these, seeĪRCHIVED: GNU Emacs Quick Reference Guide. Commands in emacs are either control characters (hold down the key while typing another character) or are prefixed by one of a set of reserved characters: or -X.

Selecting them (e.g., deleting the next character, the next word, orįrom the cursor to the end of the line).

You also can use commands for removing chunks of text without first Once you have a region selected, the most basic commands are: The default way to cut and paste text in Emacs is to use keyboard commands,īut there are easier ways available if you are using Emacs in an (See ARCHIVED: In Emacs, how do I select a region of text?) To cut or copy text, first you must select it. In this document, the terms 'cut' and 'paste' will be used, butīear in mind that all other Emacs documentation will use 'kill' and Yanking, as in yanking the text back from the clipboard and into theįile. Cutting is called killing, and pasting is called Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.ĭifferent names. This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University.

Emacs shortcuts