The official source of product insight from the Visual Studio Engineering Team
We are pleased to announce the availability of Emacs Emulation as a free extension for Visual Studio 2010! This extension provides basic support for Emacs keybindings and text editing commands, very similar to the built-in Emacs keyboard layout in VS 2008. Once the extension is installed you should be able to use familiar keyboard shortcuts to execute Emacs commands within VS 2010.
Installing Emacs Emulation requires Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium, or Ultimate (the Express editions do not support extensions) and a one-time elevation to administrator permissions. This elevation is necessary to install the keybindings file in the Visual Studio Program Folder. The first time you launch Visual Studio after downloading and installing the extension, you should see a permissions dialog, shown below. Click OK and follow the system prompt to elevate. This is only required once; subsequent launches of Visual Studio will not prompt for elevation.
After installing the extension and keybindings file, go to Tools->Options->Keyboard to select the Emacs keyboard mapping scheme, as shown below:
You can begin using Emacs shortcuts as soon as you’ve selected Emacs as your keyboard mapping scheme. Some of the most common Emacs shortcuts supported by this extension are:
General Shortcut Keys
Command
Keys
Description
Edit.EmacsExtendedCommand
ALT + X
Places the cursor in the Find/Command box on the Standard toolbar.
Edit.EmacsFindReplace
SHIFT + ALT + 5
Displays the replace options in the Quick tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
Edit.EmacsPasteRotate
ALT + Y
Pastes an item from the Clipboard Ring tab of the Toolbox to the file and automatically selects the pasted item. Press ALT + Y again to paste the next item to the Clipboard Ring.
Edit.EmacsQuit
CTRL + G
Stops the current command or code and deactivates the region.
Edit.EmacsUniversalArgument
CTRL + U
Prompts for an integer, returns negative if the first character entered is a hyphen. When a non-digit character is entered, the prefix for the command is set to the entered integer. If no integer is entered, the default value is 4. Repeatedly invoking the command multiplies the current value entered by the previous accumulated value.
Text Manipulation
Edit.EmacsBreakLine
ENTER
Inserts a new line.
Edit.EmacsBreakLineIndent
CTRL + J
Inserts a new line and indents it.
Edit.EmacsCharTranspose
CTRL + T
Transposes the characters on either side of the cursor. For example, Ed|n Sub would be changed to read End| Sub.
Edit.EmacsDeleteSelection
CTRL + DELETE
Deletes the current selection.
Edit.EmacsDeleteToEOL
CTRL + K
Deletes from the cursor to the end of the current line.
Edit.EmacsLineOpen
CTRL + O
Inserts a new line after the cursor. The cursor stays in the current line.
Edit.EmacsQuotedInsert
CTRL + Q
Reads another key and inserts the key into the buffer. Keys must be 8-bit ASCII characters. Use this command to insert control characters, meta characters, or graphics characters into the buffer.
Edit.EmacsWordCapitalize
ALT + C
Capitalizes the character to the right of the cursor or the first character of the next word if the cursor is between words.
Edit.EmacsWordDeleteToEnd
ALT + D
Deletes the characters to the right of the cursor to the end of the word.
Edit.EmacsWordDeleteToStart
ALT + BACKSPACE —or— ALT + DELETE
Deletes the characters from the left of the cursor to the start of the word.
Edit.EmacsWordLowercase
ALT + L
Changes the selected text to lowercase characters.
Edit.EmacsWordTranspose
ALT + T
Transposes the words on either side of the cursor. For example, |End Sub would be changed to read Sub End|.
Edit.EmacsWordUppercase
ALT + U
Changes the selected text to uppercase characters.
Text Navigation
Edit.EmacsCharLeft
CTRL + B
Moves the cursor one character to the left.
Edit.EmacsCharRight
CTRL + F
Moves the cursor one character to the right.
Edit.EmacsDocumentEnd
END —or— SHIFT + ALT + . (period) —or— SHIFT + END —or— CTRL + X, ]
Moves the cursor to the bottom of the current document.
Edit.EmacsDocumentStart
HOME —or— SHIFT + ALT + , (comma) —or— SHIFT + HOME —or— CTRL + X, [
Moves the cursor to the top of the current document.
Edit.EmacsGoToLine
ALT + G
Displays the Go To Line dialog box, which allows you to navigate to a specific line of code in the current document.
Edit.EmacsLineDown
CTRL + N
Moves the cursor down one line.
Edit.EmacsLineEnd
CTRL + E
Moves the cursor to the end of the current line. If you use word wrap, the cursor moves to the physical, not the displayed, end of the current line.
Edit.EmacsLineStart
CTRL + A
Moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line. If you use word wrap, the cursor moves to the physical, not the displayed, beginning of the current line.
Edit.EmacsLineUp
CTRL + P
Moves the cursor up one line.
Edit.EmacsPopMark
CTRL + X, CTRL + SPACEBAR —or— CTRL + X, CTRL + SHIFT + 2
Moves the cursor to the current mark and then removes the mark for the location stack.
Edit.EmacsScrollLineCenter
CTRL + L
Scrolls the document so that the current line is now in the center of the viewable area in the editor.
Edit.EmacsScrollLineTop
SHIFT + ALT + 1
Scrolls the document so that the current line appears at the top of the viewable area in the editor.
Edit.EmacsScrollPageDown
CTRL + V
Scrolls down within the document.
Edit.EmacsScrollPageUp
ALT + V
Scrolls up within the document.
Edit.EmacsSetMark
CTRL + SHIFT + 2 —or— CTRL + SPACEBAR
Adds a mark to the location stack for the current cursor.
Edit.EmacsSwapPointAndMark
CTRL + X, CTRL + X
Moves the cursor to the current mark in the location stack and moves the current mark to the location where the cursor mark was when the command was invoked.
Edit.EmacsWordNext
CTRL + RIGHT ARROW —or— ALT + F —or— ALT + RIGHT ARROW
Moves the cursor to the first character in the next word.
Edit.EmacsWordPrevious
CTRL + LEFT ARROW —or— ALT + B —or— ALT + LEFT ARROW
Moves the cursor to the first character in the previous word.
File Management
Edit.EmacsFileSaveDirty
CTRL + X, S
Displays a list of modified files and allows you to select which files to save.
Window Management
Edit.EmacsCloseOtherWindow
CTRL + X, 1
When a window is split, this shortcut closes the pane that does not have focus.
Edit.EmacsOtherWindow
CTRL + X, O
Switches focus between panes when a window is split.
Edit.EmacsSplitVertical
CTRL + X, 2
Splits the current document in half vertically. The current line of code is centered in each window.
Once you’ve installed the Emacs Emulations extension, all of the Emacs shortcuts it enables are fully customizable. If you choose to use the Emacs keyboard schema, you’ll automatically get the shortcuts listed above. If you don’t like a particular keybinding in the Emacs schema, you can always change it through Tools->Options->Keyboard. You can switch keyboard layouts or customize shortcuts for specific commands (Emacs or otherwise) at any time.
We’re always interested in your feedback on Visual Studio and extensions published by Microsoft. In fact, this extension was created largely in response to your feedback that removing Emacs emulation from VS 2010 was causing significant pain on a daily basis; we hope we’ve addressed that pain with this extension. If you have questions or comments about Emacs Emulation, feel free to post them in the blog comments here. If you find a specific bug in the Emacs Emulation extension, please file a Connect bug report so we can investigate in more detail.
Enjoy!
Brittany Behrens Program Manager, Visual Studio Editor
Cool, now do Vim!
@Ariel Check out the VsVim extension: visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/.../59ca71b3-a4a3-46ca-8fe1-0e90e3f79329
Thank you for implementing this. I relied heavily on the emacs keyboard mode in VS 2005 and 2008.
@Ariel @Aaron There's also ViEmu. I find it to be more robust than the VsVim extension. http://viemu.com
Thanks from all of us who have invested entirely too much time gaining the muscle memory necessary to use Emacs effectively.
thanks a lot. works great (as the 2008 version)
Thanks. Much better than VS2008 was, looks like it might actually be usable. Of course what would be even better would be a VB.NET mode for Emacs with support for compiling solutions with msbuild.
Thanks! This makes VS2010 much more effective & pleasant for me to use.
This is awesome for someone who spends most of his time in emacs and some of his time in Visual Studio.
Thanks!
The extension looks enabled in VS, but the Emacs keyboard layout doesn't appear in Tools -> Options
How can we add Brief keyboard Emulator to VS 2010?
Thanks so much. This makes VS2010 much more usable.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is so important for me. Not having Emacs emulation was causing RSI issues for me because without Emacs keystrokes I was reaching for arrow and page up/down keys much more often. Now that Emacs emulation is back you have literally saved me from being disabled and unemployed.
Now I wish the quality was a little better. It is quite usable, but there are some nasty bugs, for example pressing the Tab key overwrites characters if the existing text on the line does not start at column 0.
@Anon: We're aware of a couple of significant bugs in the current version, including the Tab issue you describe. One of the advantanges of publishing Emacs emulations as an extension is that we can update it more easily; we don't have to issue a formal hotfix or wait for a service pack, as we do for VS releases. We're working on a fix for the Tab overwrite bug and will post another comment here once a new version of the extension is live.
Thanks for posting!
Brittany