There are a lot of key commands that exist in OS X that are based on the standard Emacs keys (which admittedly I know nothing about). In bash, tcsh, and other unix environments you will find a lot of these work, and sometimes they will even work in Cocoa text editing tools as well.
These are supported by Mail, TextEdit, and other a lot of other Cocoa apps:
- ctrl-a Move to the beginning of the line
- ctrl-e Move to the end of the line
- ctrl-f Move forward one character
- ctrl-b Move back one character
- ctrl-n Move to next line
- ctrl-p Move to previous line
- ctrl-d Delete character to right of cursor
- ctrl-h Delete character to left of cursor
- ctrl-k Kill from cursor to end of line (kill remembers what was deleted)
- ctrl-y Yank back what was killed, at the cursor
- (these two use their own clipboard, not the cmd-x/c/v one)
- ctrl-o Insert line after cursor
- ctrl-t Transpose characters on either side of cursor
- ctrl-l Center the display on cursor
- ctrl-v Scroll the display one screen forward
Here’s a pretty complete list of existing Mac key bindings for editing:
<http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/system-bindings.html>
Here’s how to add even more bindings to Cocoa (by adding them to
~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict):
<http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html>
And more on Emacs productivity and the Mac:
