Emacs Rectangle Editing quick help

February 7, 2006 in emacs by amit | 3 comments

Enter picture mode (ESC-x picture-mode)

Marking rectangle

Go to top left corner, press CTRL-Space.
Go to bottom right, press CTRL-x-x (This selects the rectangle)

Working on rectangle

Press CTRL-x-r-k to kill the rectangle (and make it available as 'last-killed-rectangle')
Press CTRL-x-r-d to delete the rectangle
Press CTRL-x-r-y to yank 'last-killed-rectangle' with its top right at the mark.

Press ESC-x-clear-rectangle to fill the rectangle with spaces.

Finally quit the picture mode with CTRL-c-c

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Tags: emacs

3 comments

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Vaibhav Mahimkar on January 3, 2007 at 12:54 pm

Thanks for the helpful commands. However the CTRL-c-c doesnt quit the mode, I used ESC thrice instead
-Vaibhav

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Luca Martini on January 10, 2007 at 3:06 am

I think that using picture mode is not necessary.
You could simply select the text as usual and then use the rectangle commands.
—
Luca

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amit on January 10, 2007 at 6:05 am

Vaibhav: I tried on gnu emacs and xemacs, in both, I was able to quit picture mode by CTRL-c-c. Maybe your environment has unbounded the key combination or bound it to something else. Try full commands instead of keystrokes: i.e. ESC-x-kill-rectangle ESC-x-delete-rectangle , ESC-x-yank-rectangle and ESC-x-clear-rectangle.

Luca: Without picture mode, you cannot select a rectangle, only multiple lines. (Update it seems you can still use the full commands, but you lose the keybindings)

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