20 Commands for Human Languages

The term text has two widespread meanings in our area of the computer field. One is data that is a sequence of characters. In this sense of the word any file that you edit with Emacs is text. The other meaning is more restrictive: a sequence of characters in a human language for humans to read (possibly after processing by a text formatter), as opposed to a program or commands for a program.

Human languages have syntactic and stylistic conventions that editor commands should support or use to advantage: conventions involving words, sentences, paragraphs, and capital letters. This chapter describes Emacs commands for all these things. There are also commands for filling, or rearranging paragraphs into lines of approximately equal length. The commands for moving over and killing words, sentences, and paragraphs, while intended primarily for editing text, are also often useful for editing programs.

Emacs has several major modes for editing human language text. If a file contains plain text, use Text mode, which customizes Emacs in small ways for the syntactic conventions of text. For text which contains embedded commands for text formatters, Emacs has other major modes, each for a particular text formatter. Thus, for input to TeX, you can use TeX mode; for input to nroff, Nroff mode.