Getting around with the cursor

Unless your system is poorly configured or you're working over a strange network connection of some sort, the arrow keys and page up/page down buttons should work as expected. That's a start. With time you'll get to know emacs' other way of maneuvering the cursor up and down, and once you get used to it you'll find it's faster because you don't have to take your hands from the keyboard. The commands are as follows:

• C-f Forward (i.e. to the right)
• C-b Backward (i.e. to the left)
• C-n Next line (i.e. down)
• C-p Previous line (i.e. up)

You can repeat any number of times by prefixing an argument with the command Control-u as follows. Let's say you want to move forward 8 characters. Enter control-u 8 control-f all in a row. We'll see the control-u command later in this document for other commands that require a number, like setting margins to a certain number or characters wide and so on.

In addition to the keyboard commands to move the cursor by one letter, which we've just seen, emacs has commands to move the cursor by other units as well: by a word, to the beginning or end of the current line, by a sentence, and by a paragraph, as shown in Figure 4:

Figure 4: Cursor Movement