The commands presented here complement the filling techniques described above and provide some additional functionality as well that's useful for writers. Let's start with transposition. Word processors don't offer anything of the sort. The basic commands are shown in Figure 11. C-t with transpose your current character with the character previous and M-t will do the same with words. C-x C-t will do the same with lines (remember a line is not the same as a sentence here). M-T will transpose your current line with the line above it. Emacs offers other transpose commands; find them by typing M-x apropos, hitting return, and then typing "transpose." You'll be surprised by the variety.
C-o is one of the commands I'm most grateful for. It inserts a blank line and forces all the rest of the text down from the position of the cursor. In other programs you have to hit return and then arrow your way back up to do this. The more you use it the more you'll come to like it. Just as useful is the opposite: say you've got several blank lines between two paragraphs and you want to clean it up. Rather than manually deleting each line, just hit C-x C-o to remove all blank lines except one. Two additional commands - M-backslash and M-space clean up space between words, the former removing all spaces and tabs thereby juxtaposing the two words, and the latter removing all spaces but one. The last command is two clean up in general. Invoke M-x canonically-space-region after having selected a body of text. It will remove all extraneous spaces so that there's one space between words and two after a period. If you've seriously mashed up your text, this is a quick way to put it back together. Shortcuts like these are the ones that give you the advantage over word processor-users. M-^ will join your current line to the previous. If you ever want to put together the text of an email that has been hard formatted (hard wrapped), this is a good way to do so, and use it in a macro (see section 18 below) to do so more efficiently, starting at the bottom of the text and working your way up.
