Text entered at the keyboard is inserted into the buffer. In overwrite mode, which can be toggled by pressing INSERT, one character is deleted from in front of the caret position for every character that is inserted. The caret is drawn as a horizontal line while overwrite mode is active. The status bar also indicates if overwrite mode is active; see the section called “The Status Bar” for details.

Inserting text while there is a selection will replace the selection with the inserted text.

When inserting text, the TAB and ENTER keys might not behave entirely like you expect because of various indentation features; see the section called “Tabbing and Indentation” for details.

The simplest way to delete text is with the BACKSPACE and DELETE keys. If nothing is selected, they delete the character before or after the caret, respectively. If a selection exists, both delete the selection.

More advanced deletion commands are described in the section called “Working With Words”, the section called “Working With Lines” and the section called “Working With Paragraphs”.