Commands
In the normal editing mode, Emacs behaves like other text editors: the character keys (a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, etc.) insert the corresponding characters, the arrow keys move the editing point, backspace deletes text, and so forth. Users invoke other commands with modified keystrokes: pressing the control key and/or the meta key/alt key/Escape key in conjunction with a regular key. Every editing command is actually an invocation of a function in the Emacs Lisp environment. Even a command as simple as typing a to insert the character a involves calling a function: in this case, self-insert-command.
Alternatively, users preferring IBM Common User Access style keys can use "cua-mode". This has been a third-party package up to, and including, GNU Emacs 21, but is included in GNU Emacs from version 22 onward.
The commands save-buffer and save-buffers-kill-emacs use multiple modified keystrokes. For example, C-x C-c means: while holding down the control key, press x; then, while holding down the control key, press c.
Some Emacs commands work by invoking an external program (such as ispell for spell-checking or gcc for program compilation), parsing the program's output, and displaying the result in Emacs.
Read more about this topic: GNU Emacs, Using Emacs
Famous quotes containing the word commands:
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Unpaid work never commands respect ...”
—Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856–1940)
“I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)