How to select or highlight a block in Emacs?

Question

I want to select or highlight a block in emacs without using mouse but doing it from the keyboard like vim's visual mode. What is the easiest way to do this from a keyboard?

Answer 1

Take a look at region-rectangle in emacs.

In short, you start selection like usual with Control-Space, then kill region with Control-x r k and paste (or yank) killed block with Control-x r y.

Answer 2

If I understand the question correctly, it is not about rectangular regions originally.

C-Spc puts a mark at the current position.

Wherever your cursor is afterwards, the text between the last mark and the current position is "selected" (you can highlight this by activating transient-mark-mode, but this will also mean that marks have to be deleted when you don't want highlight).

You can operate on that region with commands like:

C-w . . Kill region. This deletes and puts the region into the kill ring.
C-y . . Yank. This inserts the last snippet from the kill ring.
M-y . . Cycle kill ring. Immediately after C-y, this replaces the yanked part by the other snippets in the kill ring.
M-w . . Save region into kill ring. Like C-w, but doesn't delete.

This is just the basic usage. Marks have other uses, too. I recommend the tutorial (C-h t).

Answer 3

Emacs 24.4 now has rectangle-mark-mode. C-x space to invoke it.

Answer 4

See the article: "Working with rectangular selections", especially the comments section. See also the section of CUA mode documentation titled "CUA rectangle support". There's also a nice video on vimeo.

Answer 5

Although C-SPC is a common way to start marking something from wherever your point is, there are often quicker/easier ways that don't involve explicitly moving to start/end points...

Built-in selection shortcuts

• M-h — an important means to mark a paragraph. A "paragraph" often means a block of code.

• C-M-h and C-M-@ — for marking sexps and defuns, respectively. This works for several languages, not just lisps.

• hold down shift — another slick way to highlight during movement. E.g., M-S-f selects forward a whole word. This is shift-select-mode, and it is enabled by default in Emacs 24+. On some (non-chiclet) keyboards, you should be able to hold down C-S- with a single pinky.

You can press any of these repeatedly to grow the selection.

_{(NOTE: use C-g often to cancel marking while experimenting.)}

Add-ons

There are a few add-on packages that improve selecting regions and things. These are all play nicely together and fit different use cases. Use them all!

• Expand-Region: Expand region increases the selected region by semantic units. Just keep pressing the key until it selects what you want. C-= is a recommended binding for it. Hit it a few times to get what you need.

• Easy-Kill: Use M-w and a mnemonic to select different types of things, like words, sexps, lists, etc.

• Zop-to-Char: Like zap-to-char, but provides nice selection and other menu-driven actions.

• diff-hl: Highlight uncommitted changed regions. Use diff-hl-mark-hunk to select/mark a hunk.

Answer 6

Use Control-Space to set a mark and move your cursor.

The transient-mark-mode will highlight selections for you. M-x transient-mark-mode.

You can setup Emacs to enable this mode by default using a customization. M-x customize-option RET transient-mark-mode.

Answer 7

... and in case you are using Ubuntu and C-spc is not working for you: you need to clear the IBus "next input method" keybinding, as in

run ibus-setup and change the key binding for "next input method" to something else (or delete it entirely by clicking the "..." button and then the "Delete" button).

Quote taken from an answer to a SO question.

Answer 8

To expand answer of Edin Salkovic, if you use CUA mode, you can use to begin a visual block selection. There are plenty of shortcuts to control block selection described in documentation of CUA.

Answer 9

With Emacs 25, simply press C-Space and then move your cursor wherever you want to highlight/select the region of text which interests you. After that, you may need these commands:

• C-w for cutting.
• M-w for copying .
• C-y for pasting .