Macs Have Emacs Key Bindings?

May 18

As a relatively new user of Macs, I was amazed to find that I could use some Emacs key bindings by default in Mac OS X. I’m sure that many people out there already know about this, but I thought it significant enough to write about it. Key bindings are basically combinations of keys that will perform some action because it is associated with it. For example, Ctrl+S is generally regarded as being used to save something, Ctrl+P is used to print, etc.

Anyways, for those of you using Mac OS X and who don’t know much about Emacs I wanted to give a short run down. Emacs is basically an extensible text editor with the ability to have user-defined functions. There are key bindings that have a specified meaning when you’re using Emacs. Some useful ones that you might consider trying out are:

Ctrl+f - Move 1 character forward Ctrl+b - Move 1 character backward Ctrl+d - Delete character in front of the curser Ctrl+a - Move to beginning of line Ctrl+e - Move to end of line

There are many more key bindings available to Emacs that seem like they will usually get overridden by the program. Remember, this hint is for Mac OS X users. The most useful place that I could use these key bindings was in text fields in Firefox.

Try it out and let me know. Don’t blame me, though, if you hit the wrong button or if the key binding is overridden to be something else in the program that you try it with!