This is mostly for me (as is mostly everything here), but I’ve been working with Emacs for the past couple of weeks and it’s become my primary text-editor for any long, multi-documented, want to move quick task. Actually honestly for the first week I worked really slow within emacs, so slow I closed it down and opened up Notepad. But after a while I figured out some of the keyboard shortcuts, which at first are very unintuitive since I’m use to working within Visual Studio and have a lot of those keyboard shortcuts already memorized and are in my muscle memory. So it was hard to work against my memory and have to exert my mind to remember ‘Wait, how do I copy again? How do I paste?’.

After lots of time with that, I’ve managed to learn some of the really essential shortcuts. I know that there many more useful ones out there, but at least having these few keyboard commands at your fingertips won’t make you want to shout followed by crying.

A few notes first. The Alt-key is abbreviated as M¹ and the Ctrl-key is abbreviated as C. So C-x C-f means Hold Ctrl then press ‘x’ followed by Holding Ctrl again (or keep holding it from before) and press ‘f’. Dashes ‘-‘ connect key pairs.

[C-x C-f] find and open (or create if non-existing) file
[M-w] copy
[C-y] paste
[C-n] next line (like the DOWN arrow, think of 'n' as 'next')
[C-p] previous line (like the UP arrow, think of 'p' as 'previous')
[C-f] next character (like the right arrow, think of 'f' as 'forward')
[C-b] previous character (like the left arrow, think of 'b' as 'back')
[M-x] enter command, such as M-x 'cd' to change directory
[C-x 1] close all windows except your current window
[C-x 2] open a window vertically
[C-x 3] open a window horizontally
[C-s] search
[C-x b] change to another open buffer
[C-x C-b] list all open buffers
[C-x C-s] save
[C-x h] select all
[C-x C-c] quit

And those are the main shortcuts that you need to know to at least survive.