Boon tutorial. See end for copying conditions. This tutorial assumes that you know Emacs already. Make sure boon is installed. Load the colemak configuration with: (require 'boon-colemak) You may also (require 'boon-extras) if you like. Turn on boon globally with (boon-mode) If you just eval'ed the above, Boon may not be active in the current buffer. If it is not activated, activate it by M-x turn-on-boon-mode Boon indicates the difference between command mode and insert mode in several ways: - The modeline says Boon:STATE (where state can be INS or CMD) - The cursor is a box in command mode, and a bar in insert mode. - The modeline is red in insert mode (and its regular color in command mode) You can switch to insert mode by typing v (mnemonic: v looks like an insert mark) and back to command mode by typing . Most Emacs keychord commands via M-... and C-... are accessible as normal. For example, M-x turn-off-boon-mode reverts to your regular experience. The characters ">>" at the left margin indicate directions for you to try using a command. For instance: [Middle of page left blank for didactic purposes. Text continues below] >> You can also type C-u and C-y to scroll * BASIC CURSOR CONTROL ---------------------- How do you move to a specific place within the text on the screen? The whole right-hand side of the keyboard is dedicated to this purpose. There are several ways you can do this. You can still use the arrow keys, but it's more efficient to keep your hands in the standard position and use the commands: e i u y. These characters are equivalent to the four arrow keys, like this: Previous line, u : : Backward, e .... Current cursor position .... Forward, i : : Next line, y >> Move the cursor to the line in the middle of that diagram. You'll find it easy to remember these letters by their location on the keyboard. Note that, when you navigate within a line your hand stays on the home row. Navigating lines happens on the top row. Soon you will forget the letters that your hand is typing when moving the cursor. You will be using these basic cursor positioning commands a lot, but there are faster ways to go about moving the cursor. The movement of cursor across lines is the same as in regular Emacs. If moving by characters is too slow, you can move by words. The key "o" moves forward a word and "n" moves back a word. >> Type a few o's and n's. As in regular Emacs, when you are in the middle of a word, o moves to the end of the word. When you are in white space between words, o moves to the end of the following word. "n" works likewise in the opposite direction. In fact, o and n move by whole syntactic units. >> Type o and n a few times within a parenthesized expression. Combine it with e and i to get to the place you want. 54 / ((8 + y) * (x - 3)) Notice that you can quickly move in the expression while staying comfortably on the home row. You can move to the beginning or end of a line by typing "l" or ";". As u and y, these line-based commands are on the top row. Emacs tries to manage the cursor position inside a line intelligently. This often works, but one sometimes need to quickly move to the beginning or end of line after moving up or down. You can do all this by staying on the top row. If you want to speed up moving up and down, use the shift key: "U" and "Y" move by whole paragraphs. >> Try a couple of "U", and then a couple of "Y". Try a couple of "l", and then a couple of ";" Checkout the cheat sheet (linked from README) for a summary of movement operations. >> Try all of these commands now a few times for practice. These are the most often used commands. Two other (less important) cursor motion commands are "d", which moves to the end of the whole text. >> Try . We will see later more commands taking arguments which can be specified in this way. >> Try >p and

> Move to this line and type j- - k (mnemonic: bacK to marK) jumps pops a mark and jumps to it. (If a region is active, exchange point and mark) - h (mnemonic: hop) activates ace-jump-mode (if installed) * IF EMACS STOPS RESPONDING --------------------------- If Emacs stops responding to your commands, you can stop it safely by typing C-g. You can use C-g to stop a command which is taking too long to execute. You can also use C-g to discard a numeric argument or the beginning of a command that you do not want to finish. is an alternative which works in many contexts. * C-x prefix ------------- Instead of the C-x prefix; you may just type 'x' >> Type x 2 to split this window >> Type x 1 to close the other windows * INSERTING AND DELETING ------------------------ If you want to insert text, type 'v' (can you remember the mnemonic?). Ordinary characters, like A, 7, *, etc., are then inserted as you type them. To insert a Newline character, type . In insert mode, regular Emacs editing commands can be used. >> Type v to insert some text; then to go back to command mode. Deleting text is mostly done with the 't' command (mnemonic: take). >> Type "te" to delete the character before the cursor In the above "e" is the argument to the "t" command. >> Type "tn" to delete backwards, up to the beginning of a word You can also use a left-hand region specifier to delete: >> Type "ts" to delete the symbol where the cursor is (even if in the middle of the symbol) One of the most useful region specifier is , which refers to the current line. >> Type "t" to delete the current line. The region specifiers are defined in the boon-select-map keymap. (Type C-h v boon-select-map to inspect it) * MULTIPLYING ------------- Arguments can be given a repeat count. >> Type "t7e" to delete seven characters forward. To insert a character several times, you can use the escaping command "q" (mnemonic: quote). >> Try that now -- type \ 8 q * to insert ********. You can also kill a segment of text with one uniform method. Move to one end of that part, and type . ( is the Space bar.) Next, move the cursor to the other end of the text you intend to kill. As you do this, Emacs highlights the text between the cursor and the position where you typed C-. Finally, type "t". This kills all the text between the two positions. >> Move the cursor to the Y at the start of the previous paragraph. >> Type . Emacs should display a message "mark 0" at the bottom of the screen. >> Move the cursor to the n in "end", on the second line of the paragraph. >> Type t. This will kill the text starting from the Y, and ending just before the n. Selecting text with actually takes an argument. >> Type "p" to select a paragraph >> Type again to undo the selection The region specifier "current line" () can be given to the marking command (). >> Type to select the current line >> Type "y" a few times to select some lines >> Type "t" to delete all these lines The command for yanking is "s". (mnemonic: splice) >> Try it; type s to yank the text back. Shifted "S" does yank-pop. * UNDO ------ Undo is bound to "-" (minus); while redo is bound to "_" (underscore). * PARENS -------- Boon provides help to manipulate parentheses. The command 'a' (mnemonic: around) adds parentheses around a region. It takes two arguments: 1. the kind of parentheses to use ('p' for regular parentheses) 2. the region (specified by the same language as the 't' command) >> Move the cursor inside a word and type 'aps' to enclose it in parens. >> Inspect the kind of parentheses available by typing 'C-h v boon-enclosures ' It is possible to remove parentheses by using the 'a' operator, which transforms a region spec to its enclosure. >> Move the cursor inside a (sexp), and type 'tx' to delete the expression. >> Move the cursor inside another (sexp), and type 'tax' to delete the parens. Region specifiers can be freely combined. * SEARCHING ----------- Searching is bound to "f?" (search forward) and "w?" (search backward). The question mark stands for the kind of thing you want to search. For example "fe" moves to the next error. "f" does incremental search. Use "f C-h" to see all the things you can search. * HELM ------- Helm is a very useful package. Boon provides special support for it. >> If you have not done it yet, install helm now. (package-install 'helm) The command 'p' starts helm-occur; which does a quick search for all occurrences of a pattern in the current buffer. >> Type 'p' now You are now in a helm "command" state, which accepts a number of commands to govern helm. One of the most used commands is to revert to helm insert state. This can be done by typing "v" or "". >> type then >> type "helm" to jump to the beginning of this section. You can search for the current symbol by typing "s" while in helm command state. >> Move the cursor to an occurrence of the helm word, and type "ps". >> Use y and u to select an occurrence, then type to jump to the currently selected occurrence The keymap for this helm command state is boon-helm-command-map. Other, less common uses for helm are bound to "g?". >> Type "g C-h" to see the bound helm variants. * COPYING --------- This tutorial descends from a long line of Emacs tutorials starting with the one written by Stuart Cracraft for the original Emacs. This version of the tutorial is not a part of GNU Emacs, but derived from the standard Emacs tutorial, Copyright (C) 1985, 1996, 1998, 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.