The Keyboard and Emacs Notation

The layout of the Sun keyboard may look familiar, but the layout even varies from machine to machine. However, instead of separate arrow (Left, Right, Up, Down) and cursor control keys (Page Up, Page Down, Home, End) like on an IBM PC, there are the keypad keys (on the right side) and the extra labeled function keys (on the left side - Cut, Paste Copy, etc). The Control, Caps Lock, ~ (tilde) and \ (backslash) keys may be in a different place than you would expect. Also, there are some keys that are new: $\Diamond$ (Meta) on each side of the space bar, and ALT GRAPH, and COMPOSE (abbreviated CMP) on the lower right. Almost all of the keys have functions bound to them; in many cases those functions correspond to the label on the key. If you want to know what function will be executed when you press a certain key or key combination, first press F1 k (which runs describe-key) and then press the key of interest. A *Help* buffer will be displayed to describe the function to which that key is bound.

The CONTROL, META, SHIFT, and ALT keys ( ALT GRAPH works the same as ALT) are used as control keys. This means press and hold that key and then press another key to invoke the desired function. The following table shows the notation used throughout this document and in the Emacs Reference Manual.

KEY	PRESS & HOLD	THEN PRESS	WHICH EXECUTES
C-t	CONTROL	t	transpose-previous-chars
M-t	META	t	transpose-words
C-M-t	CONTROL and META	t	transpose-lines
A-t	ALT or ALT GRAPH	t	transpose-sentences
F7		F7	query-replace
C-F7	CONTROL	F7	fill-paragraph
M-F7	META	F7	set-fill-column
S-F7	SHIFT	F7	center-region
A-F7	ALT or ALT GRAPH	F7	auto-fill-mode