Due to a frequent need to work off of different servers, I found it necessary to graduate from nano and up my command line text editor skills. Enter emacs! Aaron gave me a quick crash course, from which I generated a cheat sheet of everyday commands to tape to my monitor. Rule #1 of emacs (for me at least) was “forget every keyboard shortcut you’ve ever known,” so having a cheat sheet to remind me that “copy” is “escape key, w key” was necessary until my muscle memory kicked in.

If you’re in this situation maybe this cheat sheet will help you too.

Gist is here.

EMACS CHEAT SHEET

C-g . . . . . . . Stop bothering me
C-x C-c . . . . . Exit Emacs

C-x C-f . . . . . Find File
C-x k . . . . . . Kill Buffer
C-x b . . . . . . Load Buffer
C-x o . . . . . . Next Buffer
C-x left/right  . Next/Previous buffer
C-x [0-3] . . . . Fiddle with buffer views

M-g g . . . . . . Goto Line
C-a . . . . . . . Beginning of line
C-e . . . . . . . End of line
C-v . . . . . . . Page down
M-v . . . . . . . Page up
C-s . . . . . . . Search in buffer
C-x C-s . . . . . Save buffer

C-space . . . . . Set mark
C-w . . . . . . . Cut
M-w . . . . . . . Copy
C-y . . . . . . . Paste

M-x things:
M-x shell . . . . . . Open Shell
M-p . . . . . . . . . Previous shell command
M-x replace-string  . Find/Replace in file
M-x rgrep . . . . . . Find in folders
M-x list-packages . . Package Manager

Magit:
s . . . . Stage
u . . . . Unstage
c . . . . Commit
k . . . . Discard modification
P . . . . Push
F . . . . Pull
C-c C-c . Save commit message

Dired Mode:
m . . . Mark file
u . . . Unmark file
! . . . Perform shell command on file(s)