Question

I decided that I was ready to try something new, after a few years of using gEdit for most of my coding needs, and try to learn using Emacs. I knew this would be difficult, as I have heard how complex Emacs can be, but I was lured by its power. The hardest thing has been getting used to writing ELisp in the .emacs file to change things about the editor. I can’t currently do it myself, but I have found a few helpful snippets here and there to change some options.

One thing I have been having a lot of problems with is getting Emacs to remember the text I have selected after a command. For instance, I commonly highlight a section of code to mass indent it. However, if I do this in Emacs, it will move the selected text only once before unselecting all of the text. Does anyone know a way around this?

Anyway, I apologize for what seems to me to be an easy question, but after an hour of Google searching and looking around here on SO, I thought it was worth asking. I have a few more questions about Emacs, but I will save them and ask separately after I get this straightened out. Thanks!

UPDATE

A few people have asked about what mod I am using and what type of text I am entering. While I don’t know much about Emacs modes, I am editing a pure text file at the moment. Something like this:

Hello, I am a simple text file
that is made up of three separate 
lines.

If I highlight all three lines and hit TAB, I get this:

    Hello, I am a simple text file
    that is made up of three separate 
    lines.

This is great, however, if I use C-x C-x like some suggest below to reselect the text and hit TAB again, I get this:

        Hello, I am a simple text file
            that is made up of three separate 
                lines.

I hope this helps!

Answer 1

Try typing C-x C-x after Emacs unselects it.

Then, instead of hitting tab (I never knew that tab does what you said! That’s totally whacked.), do M-8 C-x C-i. Pity it’s so many keys, but it ought to do what you want — namely, shove everything over 8 columns. Obviously replace the M-8 with something else if you want some other number of columns.