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Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition
book

Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

by Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric S. Raymond, Bill Rosenblatt
December 2004
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
536 pages
19h 28m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning GNU Emacs, 3rd Edition

Marking Text to Delete, Move, or Copy

What if the text you want to delete is just a phrase? Or half a paragraph? Or several paragraphs? In Emacs, you select text by defining an area called a region. You can mark regions with the mouse or by using the keyboard. What happens with the mouse is a bit complicated, so we describe it later in this chapter, following our discussion of the system clipboard.

To define a region using the keyboard, you use a secondary pointer called a mark. Some versions of Emacs display the mark on the screen; unfortunately, in GNU Emacs, the mark is invisible.

You set the mark at one end of the region by pressing C-Space or C-@, then move the cursor to the other end of the region. (The cursor is sometimes also referred to as point. There is one minor but important difference between the cursor and the point, however. The cursor is on top of a character; in Emacs, the point is actually in between the character the cursor is on and the previous character. As we said, this difference is minor, but it helps you to visualize where the cursor should be when you mark a region.) Figure 2-5 illustrates point, mark, and region.

Point, mark, and region

Figure 2-5. Point, mark, and region

Let's mark a sample region. In this example, we remove the phrase "it was the worst of times." First, we find the beginning of the phrase. Then we set the mark, move forward to the end of the phrase, and ...

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ISBN: 0596006489Supplemental ContentErrata Page