The Caret

The caret is the location where text insertion and deletion takes place. It is drawn as a blinking red line (but like most text area parameters, that can be customized). Moving the caret is one of the most commonly performed operations and there are a number of ways to do it. The most basic are covered here; more advanced caret operations are described in Chapter 4.

The most direct way to move the caret is to click the mouse where you want it to be positioned. It can also be moved using the keyboard; The Left, Right, Up and Down keys move the caret in the respective direction. The PageUp and PageDown keys move the caret up and down one viewscreen, respectively.

When pressed once, the Home key will go to the first non-whitespace character on the current line. Pressing it multiple times will move the caret to the beginning of the line and then to the first visible line. End behaves in a similar manner, going to the last non-whitespace character, the end of the line, and then to the last visible line. Control-Home and Control-End move the caret to the beginning and end of the buffer, respectively.