Emacs has the concept of extended commands, which consist of M-x
followed by the name of the command. As an example of a useful
extended command, sometimes the backspace key gets mapped to C-h (I
find this happens sometimes under remote screen sessions, you'll know
this is the case if you hit the backspace key twice and the emacs help
buffer pops up, just hit C-g
to clear the help window). To get the
backspace key to act as it should (i.e., it deletes the previous
character), you enter M-x normal-erase-is-backspace-mode
. That's a lot
to type, so you can take advantage of Emacs' command-completion by
typing a partial command and hitting the Tab
key one or more times. In
this case, you type M-x normal-e
and hit Tab
, and Emacs will complete
the command for you. You can then just hit Enter
to execute the
command. If you don't type enough of the command to make it unique,
Emacs will display a list of alternatives for you to choose from. For
example, if you type M-x normal-
and hit the Tab
key, Emacs will pop
up a buffer named *Completion* with with two
alternatives for you to choose from: normal-mode and
mormal-erase-is-backspace-mode. Just type a bit more of the command
you want and hit tab again to narrow the completion list or to
complete the command if it is the only one left.