Moving Text Within a Window

Sometimes you are looking at a screenful of text, and only part of the current paragraph you are reading is visible on the screen. The commands detailed in this section are used to shift which part of the current node is visible on the screen.

SPC (scroll-forward)

C-v

Shift the text in this window up. That is, show more of the node which is currently below the bottom of the window. With a numeric argument, show that many more lines at the bottom of the window; a numeric argument of 4 would shift all of the text in the window up 4 lines (discarding the top 4 lines), and show you four new lines at the bottom of the window. Without a numeric argument, SPC takes the bottom two lines of the window and places them at the top of the window, redisplaying almost a completely new screenful of lines.

DEL (scroll-backward)

M-v

Shift the text in this window down. The inverse of scroll-forward.

The scroll-forward and scroll-backward commands can also move forward and backward through the node structure of the file. If you press SPC while viewing the end of a node, or DEL while viewing the beginning of a node, what happens is controlled by the variable scroll-behaviour. See section Manipulating Variables, for more information.

C-l (redraw-display)

Redraw the display from scratch, or shift the line containing the cursor to a specified location. With no numeric argument, `C-l' clears the screen, and then redraws its entire contents. Given a numeric argument of n, the line containing the cursor is shifted so that it is on the nth line of the window.

C-x w (toggle-wrap)

Toggles the state of line wrapping in the current window. Normally, lines which are longer than the screen width wrap, i.e., they are continued on the next line. Lines which wrap have a `\' appearing in the rightmost column of the screen. You can cause such lines to be terminated at the rightmost column by changing the state of line wrapping in the window with C-x w. When a line which needs more space than one screen width to display is displayed, a `$' appears in the rightmost column of the screen, and the remainder of the line is invisible.