Del deletes the character just before the cursor

Ctrl-d deletes the next character after the cursor

Alt-Del kills the word immediately before the cursor

Alt-d kills the next word after the cursor

Ctrl-k kills from the cursor position to end of line

Alt-k kills to the end of the current sentence

Killing & Yanking

The word 'kill', instead of deleting, is used to signify that the set of characters thus `killed’ have been saved into a special 'clipboard' area. They can be 'yanked’ meaning that they can be pasted to the current position using Ctrl Y. This operation is similar to the Cut-&-Paste, as we see in most MS-Windows systems.

Emacs, however, is a lot more than what we have just seen. We hope this article will encourage you to use it.