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In this chapter we describe the commands that are especially useful for the times when you catch a mistake in your text just after you have made it, or change your mind while composing text on line.
delete-backward-char).
backward-kill-word).
backward-kill-sentence).
The DEL character (delete-backward-char) is the most
important correction command. When used among graphic (self-inserting)
characters, it can be thought of as canceling the last character typed.
When your mistake is longer than a couple of characters, it might be more convenient to use M-DEL or C-x DEL. M-DEL kills back to the start of the last word, and C-x DEL kills back to the start of the last sentence. C-x DEL is particularly useful when you are thinking of what to write as you type it, in case you change your mind about phrasing. M-DEL and C-x DEL save the killed text for C-y and M-y to retrieve. See section Yanking.
M-DEL is often useful even when you have typed only a few characters wrong, if you know you are confused in your typing and aren't sure exactly what you typed. At such a time, you cannot correct with DEL except by looking at the screen to see what you did. It requires less thought to kill the whole word and start over again.
transpose-chars).
transpose-words).
transpose-sexps).
transpose-lines).
The common error of transposing two characters can be fixed, when they
are adjacent, with the C-t command (transpose-chars). Normally,
C-t transposes the two characters on either side of point. When
given at the end of a line, rather than transposing the last character of
the line with the newline, which would be useless, C-t transposes the
last two characters on the line. So, if you catch your transposition error
right away, you can fix it with just a C-t. If you don't catch it so
fast, you must move the cursor back to between the two transposed
characters. If you transposed a space with the last character of the word
before it, the word motion commands are a good way of getting there.
Otherwise, a reverse search (C-r) is often the best way.
See section Searching and Replacement.
Meta-t (transpose-words) transposes the word before point
with the word after point. It moves point forward over a word, dragging
the word preceding or containing point forward as well. The punctuation
characters between the words do not move. For example, `FOO, BAR'
transposes into `BAR, FOO' rather than `BAR FOO,'.
C-M-t (transpose-sexps) is a similar command for transposing
two expressions (see section Lists and Sexps), and C-x C-t (transpose-lines)
exchanges lines. They work like M-t except in determining the
division of the text into syntactic units.
A numeric argument to a transpose command serves as a repeat count: it tells the transpose command to move the character (word, sexp, line) before or containing point across several other characters (words, sexps, lines). For example, C-u 3 C-t moves the character before point forward across three other characters. This is equivalent to repeating C-t three times. C-u - 4 M-t moves the word before point backward across four words. C-u - C-M-t would cancel the effect of plain C-M-t.
A numeric argument of zero is assigned a special meaning (because otherwise a command with a repeat count of zero would do nothing): to transpose the character (word, sexp, line) ending after point with the one ending after the mark.
A very common error is to type words in the wrong case. Because of this, the word case-conversion commands M-l, M-u and M-c have a special feature when used with a negative argument: they do not move the cursor. As soon as you see you have mistyped the last word, you can simply case-convert it and go on typing. See section Case Conversion Commands.
spell-word).
To check the spelling of the word before point, and optionally correct it
as well, use the command M-$ (spell-word). This command runs
an inferior process containing the spell program to see whether the
word is correct English. If it is not, it asks you to edit the word (in
the minibuffer) into a corrected spelling, and then does a query-replace
to substitute the corrected spelling for the old one throughout the buffer.
If you exit the minibuffer without altering the original spelling, it
means you do not want to do anything to that word. Then the query-replace
is not done.
M-x spell-buffer checks each word in the buffer the same way that
spell-word does, doing a query-replace if appropriate for
every incorrect word.
M-x spell-region is similar but operates only on the region, not the entire buffer.
M-x spell-string reads a string as an argument and checks whether that is a correctly spelled English word. It prints in the echo area a message giving the answer.
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