Movement in Emacs

As everyone new to Emacs know, adapting to Emacs key binding takes quite a while. When I first started using Emacs, even though I found for example C-x k a quite odd key binding, I tried to learn it, no questions asked.

As I got more comfortable with Emacs I adopted more and more Emacs standard key bindings. But there was this one thing I just couldn’t understand why to use. I’m talking about the movement keys: C-n, C-p, C-f, C-b, M-f and M-b.

I read books and tutorials on Emacs and everywhere it said these are the movement keys in Emacs. But more importantly, none of them mentioned why you should use them.

I never found out why by reading any Emacs material. The way I found out was by just starting to use them. I thought, if I use Emacs, I should go the whole nine yards. So I started using the movement keys and after a while I realized why you should use them.

These are the main reasons why you should use the movement keys instead of the arrow keys:

1. Using the arrow keys is highly inefficient! They are way off from where your fingers are when you type. Moving your hand over each time you want to move the cursor, is like getting a cop of coffee each time you create a new paragraph.
2. It is much more comfortable to use the movement keys.
3. They fit together much nicer with other Emacs key bindings.

I really hope this post help you drop those inefficient, ugly and stupid arrow keys!

Ps. Using the movement keys involve a lot of Ctrl-key usage, which kills you little finger. Read about how you can save it