Emacs Emulation

This extension provides basic support for Emacs keybindings and text editing commands, very similar to the built-in Emacs keyboard layout in VS2008. Once the extension is installed you should be able to use familiar keyboard shortcuts to execute Emacs commands within Visual Studio.

Note: New version released for VS2017/VS2019. New version released for VS2022.

Note: This is a straight copy of the VS2010 version, that has been built to run on VS2012-VS2015.
The code was originally open-sourced here: https://github.com/zbrad/EmacsKeys
This version is being maintained on the justcla fork: https://github.com/justcla/EmacsKeys

Installation and Setup

Installing Emacs Emulation requires 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

Using the Emacs Keyboard Layout

You can begin using Emacs shortcuts as soon as you’ve selected Emacs as your keyboard mapping scheme.

For a list of some of the most common Emacs shortcuts supported by this extension, visit the original VS2010 verison.