Then an additional useful command: In the out-of-the-box emacs bindings, C-q is the "quoted insert" command. It will take the next character and directly insert it into the buffer. This is useful for things like tab or control characters where emacs would normally use the keystroke to do something else. I've been working in an email-related space lately so I've been doing a good amount of C-q C-m for inserting literal CRs, and C-q TAB for a few places where I want a literal tab in the source, in a buffer that interprets a normal TAB as a command to indentify the current row. I mention this because you can use the ASCII table to work out how to insert a particular control character with your keyboard literally, if you need to insert one of the handful of other characters you may be interested in every so often, like C-l for "form feed" (now used for "page feed" in some older printer-related contexts) or C-@ for NUL if you're doing something weird with binary files in a "text" buffer.