Moving around in Emacs

Normally I use the arrow keys to move around Emacs, but people keep saying I should try and learn the non-arrow keys here, so I need this information to keep reminding myself.

Org and Markdown mode seems to have similar keybindings which is good, but a lot of these are just fundamental text actions.

• C-n/p - forward/back one line
• C-f/b - forward/back one character
• M-f/b - forward/back one word
• C-down/up (often M-}/{ as well) - forward/back paragraphs, but this gets overridden depending mode.

Lines

• C-a/e - beginning/end of line

Buffer

• C-< - beginning of buffer
• C-> - end of buffer

Org and Markdown

• C-c C-n/C-p - go to next/previous heading, regardless of level. Basically, this will cycle through all the headers without regard to level.
• C-c C-f/C-b - go to next heading at same level, and will stop when it runs out, even if more is available in another paragraph somewhere.

Paragraph/Block movement in Markdown

Normally paragraphs are clusters of text surrounded by at least two newlines.

Markdown defines it’s own “markdown-forward-paragraph” function that is bound to C-down and M-}:

• C-down/up, M-}/{ - move by paragraph

and redefines a paragraph to be anything in a markdown document surrounded by “space”:

• paragraphs
• headers
• list items

This is a bit at odds with regular text mode, which doesn’t recognize list items for example; if the list item has no blank lines around it, then it won’t be seen as a paragraph in text mode but it will in markdown mode.

Markdown lets you move by block as well, with “block”, which lets you skip over whole lists.

• C-M-}\{ - move forward/back by a block, which will skip over whole lists

Paragraph/element movement in Org-mode

• M-}\{ - moves forward and back by element, at the same level if possible

In org mode, an element is a heading/paragraph/list. So if we’re on a heading, we’ll go to the next heading at the same level.

You can combine these keys with the mark, in order to select pieces of your buffer.