Delete the character before point, or the region if it is active
(delete-backward-char).
Delete the character or grapheme cluster after point, or the region if
it is active (delete-forward-char).
Delete the character after point (delete-char).
Kill to the end of the line (kill-line).
Kill forward to the end of the next word (kill-word).
Kill back to the beginning of the previous word
(backward-kill-word).
The DEL (delete-backward-char) command removes the
character before point, moving the cursor and the characters after it
backwards. If point was at the beginning of a line, this deletes the
preceding newline, joining this line to the previous one. If the
character before point is composed with one or more of the preceding
characters, and is displayed together with them as a single display
unit, a so-called grapheme cluster representing the entire
sequence, DEL deletes only a single character from the
composed sequence, which in some cases can significantly change the
appearance of the text on display. (The command
backward-delete-char-untabify, usually bound to DEL in
programming modes, does the same, see Major Modes for Programming Languages.) This is in
contrast with commands like delete-char-forward, which delete the
entire composed sequence of characters after point, see below.
For long enough sequences of composed characters, using
DEL to delete them one by one might be inconvenient. In
those cases, you can customize the option
composition-break-at-point to a non-nil value, to have
Emacs show characters around point separately, instead of showing the
result of their composition. This allows editing the composed sequence
of characters more conveniently, because you can move point inside the
composed sequence and delete characters there without having to delete
(and later re-insert) the following ones.
If the region is active, DEL deletes the text in the region instead of deleting a single character. See The Mark and the Region, for a description of the region.
On most keyboards, DEL is labeled BACKSPACE, but we refer to it as DEL in this manual. (Do not confuse DEL with the Delete key; we will discuss Delete momentarily.) On some text terminals, Emacs may not recognize the DEL key properly. See If DEL Fails to Delete, if you encounter this problem.
The Delete (delete-forward-char) command deletes in the
opposite direction: it deletes the character after point, i.e., the
character under the cursor. If point was at the end of a line, this
joins the following line onto this one. Like DEL, it
deletes the text in the region if the region is active (see The Mark and the Region).
If the character after point is composed with following characters,
Delete deletes the entire composed sequence in one go. This is in
contrast to DEL which always deletes a single character, even if
the character is composed. If composition-break-at-point is
non-nil, Delete deletes all of the composed characters from
point to the end of the composed sequence, which could be only a part of
the sequence if you moved point into the sequence.
C-d (delete-char) deletes the character after point,
similar to Delete, but regardless of whether the region is
active.
See Deletion, for more detailed information about the above deletion commands.
C-k (kill-line) erases (kills) a line at a time. If
you type C-k at the beginning or middle of a line, it kills all
the text up to the end of the line. If you type C-k at the end
of a line, it joins that line with the following line.
See Killing and Moving Text, for more information about C-k and related commands.