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I am using Emacs 23.3 on Mac OS X Lion. How can I delete the selected text region with simple key typing—something like delete or C-d? This works on windows without setting anything specific. How can I implement that in Mac OS X Lion?

Michael Hoffman
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luozengbin
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3 Answers3

12

You need to enable delete-selection-mode and then it will work ;-)

Alex Ott
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Try M-xcua-mode. This will change a lot of things about the way Emacs behaves to fit the behavior of other GUI applications. For more information, see M-S-:(info "(emacs) CUA Bindings").

You can turn it on persistently with M-xcustomize-optionRETcua-mode.

Michael Hoffman
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5

If you mean "delete between the mark and the cursor," the normal keybinding for this in Emacs is C-w (Hold down control and press w).

To set the mark, use C-SPC (hold down control and press SPACE).

Selecting a text region and then deleting it is not very common to normal Emacs users. More frequently they use

  • C-k to delete entire lines at a time (or to the end of the current line)
  • M-z (press Esc then z) to "zap to char" which will delete all text to the next occurrence of any character
  • M-DEL (press Esc then DEL) to delete backwards a whole word at a time

and others.

Joel Spolsky
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  • thanks for you answer. but i want to bind [delete] key todo "delete-char" or "kill-region" in automatic. – luozengbin Oct 28 '11 at 02:45
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    i found the way to implements this function. 
    (defun my-backward-delete-fun()
  "backward delete a char or delete selected region automic"
  (interactive)
  (if (and transient-mark-mode mark-active)
      (call-interactively 'kill-region)
    (call-interactively 'backward-delete-char-untabify)
    )
  )
(global-set-key [backspace] 'my-backward-delete-fun)
    – luozengbin Oct 28 '11 at 03:00
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    answer your own question, so you can help the next person who comes along! – Joel Spolsky Oct 28 '11 at 03:03